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.
For this anthology EF
gathered mostly improving pedagogical material, drawing on revered literary names like Shakespeare
and Milton
, as well as more recent and controversial writers like Thomas Chatterton
and Helen Maria Williams
...
Textual Features
Lucy Hutchinson
Lucretius
, as a pagan philosopher and theologian (and, as LH
and her contemporaries believed, insane much of the time and sexually promiscuous), was a daring choice for one of her religious opinions.
Lucretius, and Lucretius. “Introduction”. Lucy Hutchinson’s Translation of Lucretius, "De rerum natura", edited by Hugh De Quehen, translated by. Lucy Hutchinson, University of Michigan Press, pp. 1-20.
8, 11
Textual Features
Sarah Scott
The Introductory History of Sweden, from The Middle of the Twelfth Century is in effect an essay on biography and historiography. It argues the importance of biography, and the influence which even minor figures exercise...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Graeme Ferguson
This collection of personal writing includes occasional poems, pastorals, burlesques, ambitious longer pieces, and The Choice of Life (which precedes Johnson
's Rasselas). Notes and an index which she later supplied to this volume...
Textual Features
Sarah Fielding
David Simple predates all fictional work by Samuel Johnson
and all but the earliest works by Henry Fielding
and Samuel Richardson
, which are sometimes mistakenly spoken of as its models. It may be seen...
Textual Features
Catherine Talbot
CT
's letters often convey her literary opinions, discussing writing by, for instance, Marie de Sévigné
, Richardson
, Henry Fielding
and Samuel Johnson
. She also writes of the details of her daily life...
Textual Features
Catharine Macaulay
In the copyright row provoked by unauthorised reprints by the Edinburgh publisher Alexander Donaldson
, CM
began by asking what practices would benefit literature, and concluded that publishers needed to be able to count on...
Textual Features
Frances Brooke
Mary Singleton, supposed author of this paper, with its trenchant comments on society and politics, is an unmarried woman on the verge of fifty,
McMullen, Lorraine. An Odd Attempt in a Woman: The Literary Life of Frances Brooke. University of British Columbia Press.
14
good-humoured as well as sharply intelligent: a contribution to the...
Textual Features
Sarah Fielding
This is a work of fiction, not documentary. It relates the stories of four ex-prostitutes sympathetically, presenting a strong argument for social reform. According to scholar Katherine Binhammer
, it is the most feminist among...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Burnet
This journal includes much philosophical writing. EB
's detailed critique of the mystic Antoinette de Bourignon
(correspondent of Anna Maria van Schurman
) embodies an ingenious rational explanation of enthusiasm or belief in a divine...
Textual Features
Anne Mozley
These attractive essays in belles lettres employ a relaxed, personal speaking voice (which does not, however, reveal its gender), which puts forward literary opinions with casual confidence. Many essays (like Samuel Johnson
's before them)...
The title-page quotes Johnson
on the efficacy of education: Let it be remembered, that the efficacy of ignorance has been long tried, and has not produced the consequences expected. Let knowledge therefore take its turn...
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
A debauched earl is the narrator of this novel, which, typically for the genre, is peopled by characters from the gentry and the upper classes.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
744 (1842):110
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
