Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Samuel Johnson
-
Standard Name: Johnson, Samuel
Used Form: Dr Johnson
Arriving in eighteenth-century London as one more young literary hopeful from the provinces, SJ
achieved such a name for himself as an arbiter of poetry, of morality (through his Rambler and other periodical essays and his prose fiction Rasselas), of the language (the Dictionary), and of the literary canon (his edition of Shakespeare
and the Lives of the English Poets) that literary history has often typecast him as hidebound and authoritarian. This idea has been facilitated by his ill-mannered conversational dominance in his late years and by the portrait of him drawn by the hero-worshipping Boswell
. In fact he was remarkable for his era in seeing literature as a career open to the talented without regard to gender. From his early-established friendships with Elizabeth Carter
and Charlotte Lennox
to his mentorship of Hester Thrale
, Frances Burney
, and (albeit less concentratedly) of Mary Wollstonecraft
and Henrietta Battier
, it was seldom that he crossed the path of a woman writer without friendly and relatively egalitarian encouragement.
Zachary Williams's health improved radically after his eviction from the Charterhouse
, with better food and more comfort. He returned to his longitude investigations and that was when he made the acquaintance of a helpful...
Friends, Associates
Anna Williams
AW
's father knew many of the leading figures in the science of his day, and she probably met them through him. Her celebrated friendship with Samuel Johnson
seems to have begun through his interest...
Textual Production
Anna Williams
When Boswell
read the elegy On the Death of Stephen Gray
, F. R. S., The Author of the Present Doctrine of Electricity, he at once suspected it was by Johnson
. Williams stoutly...
The New Annual Register praised the poem's thoughts, imagery, and versification, and remarked that the concluding description of the rise of art and science rises to no small degree of sublimity.
Kennedy, Deborah. Helen Maria Williams and the Age of Revolution. Bucknell University Press.
28
Samuel Johnson
...
Literary responses
Helen Maria Williams
These volumes moved James Boswell
, in a revised edition of his life of Johnson, to withdraw his earlier description of HMW
as amiable and to assert that Johnson
would have found her current attitudes...
Education
Harriette Wilson
While she was still in her teens, although engaged in her second paid sexual relationship, her lover Frederic Lamb
set out to get her reading Milton
, Shakespeare
, Byron
, theRambler, Virgil
Friends, Associates
Mary Wollstonecraft
Newington Green was a fortunate place for MW
to have settled: it was a centre of intellectual Dissent. There she met the radical minister Richard Price
, the poet Samuel Rogers
, and the teacher...
Textual Features
Mary Wollstonecraft
Though only about twenty percent of its extracts are written by women (the same proportion as from the Bible),
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
501
this book is feminist in its emphasis on the virtue of independent judgement as...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Wollstonecraft
They included The first book of a series of lessons for children (written for MW
's elder daughter, Fanny Imlay
); a series of personal letters addressed to Imlay
(passionately expressive, ruggedly self-analytical), and to...
Intertextuality and Influence
A. Woodfin
She learns to condemn her parents' treatment of her when she boards in a family who deliberately favour the ugly, deformed one of their young twins, to redress the balance. She feels a great relief...
Rosenbaum, S. P. “An Educated Man’s Daughter: Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group”. Virginia Woolf: New Critical Essays, edited by Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy, Vision; Barnes and Noble, pp. 32-56.
34
Textual Production
Virginia Woolf
Later reprints often appeared as The Common Reader, First Series. VW
took her title from a formulation of Samuel Johnson
's, meaning that non-specialist, non-academic reader to whose taste, said Johnson, he was always...
Literary responses
Ann Yearsley
More
and Elizabeth Montagu
admired AY
as a primitive, untrained writer whose excellence came from nature, not from carefully nurtured ability: as a phenomenon verging on a freak. More's Prefatory Letter to Yearsley's Poems, on...
Friends, Associates
W. B. Yeats
Several women writers and public figures played very important roles in Yeats's life. Lady Gregory
(whom he first met in London in 1894 and whose close friend he became in 1896) played a crucial role...