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.
Her letters to her children are charming, though she seems to have encouraged the kind of rivalry among them which Samuel Johnson
deplored. In November 1753, when Robert was eight, she wrote to him: I...
Cokayne, George Edward. The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, extant, extinct, or dormant. Editor Gibbs, Vicary, St Catherine Press.
In opening and closing she invokes Samuel Johnson
(a travel writer more interested in the...
Textual Production
Jane Porter
She wrote this novel while living in London.
Porter, Jane. The Scottish Chiefs. Derby and Jackson.
19
In her preface to the first edition (now extremely rare)
Feminist Companion Archive.
she wrote that she had made no hesitation to accept truth as the helpmate of...
This bears no relation to Susanna Haswell Rowson
's Rebecca; or, The Fille de Chambre, 1792. It sounds, however, like a...
Textual Production
Ann Hatton
The dedication, to Mrs Carsgill
of Holme Lodge, Northumberland, mentions past discussions with her on the topic of the passions, and cites Johnson
's Life of Savage to prove their violence.
Hatton, Ann. Deeds of the Olden Time. A. K. Newman.
prelims
Textual Production
Hannah More
HM
published her first poem, the ballad Sir Eldred of the Bower, revised with the help of Samuel Johnson
. It was printed with another poem, The Bleeding Rock, bearing the date of...
Textual Production
Hester Mulso Chapone
Hester Mulso (later HMC
) contributed four brief letters from imaginary, high-society correspondents to the tenth number of Samuel Johnson
's Rambler.
Johnson, Samuel. The Rambler. Editors Bate, Walter Jackson and Albrecht B. Strauss, Yale University Press.
1: 51-4
Textual Production
Barbara Hofland
BH
published The Merchant's Widow and her Family. A Novel, with a title-page quotation from Samuel Johnson
and a date of 1814.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall.
4th ser. 4 (1813): 448
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...
Textual Production
Anna Williams
Johnson
wrote to Samuel Richardson
to enlist his support for AW
in her plan to compile a dictionary of philosophical, that is scientific, terms.
Johnson, Samuel. The Letters of Samuel Johnson. Editor Redford, Bruce, Princeton University Press.
1: 79-80
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Hester Mulso Chapone
When Richardson offered her a list of examples of filial disobedience, she replied that no doubt an equally heinous list could be produced of parental oppression. With Carter
she mulled over religious and literary questions...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Anne Grant
Her range of literary reference and comment is wide: as well as Richardson
(whose Clarissa she unequivocally praises),
Grant, Anne. Letters from the Mountains. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme.
2: 45-8
it encompasses Blair
, Sterne
and Smollett
as travel-writers, and Homer
. Grant charges Samuel Johnson
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Anne Grant
She likes her reading to be strenuous: she recommends Jane Austen
's Mansfield Park as light reading,
Grant, Anne. Memoir and Correspondence of Mrs. Grant of Laggan. Editor Grant, John Peter, Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans.
These letters were calculated to contribute to Steuart
's projected but never written book on Jacobite attempts on the throne between the Glorious Revolution and the Rebellion of 1745. They include some comment on women's...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins
This work has been valued chiefly for its anecdotes of Samuel Johnson
and Sir Joshua Reynolds
. LMH
closes the volume on the name of Reynolds
(printed in honorific capitals), in an implicit tribute to...
