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.
A dedication to the Princess Royal praises the immortal writings of many other women, or rather ladies. MD
herself, she says, is a person of obscure and undistinguished rank, who yet hath not reliquished the...
Publishing
Mary Deverell
Her full title was Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, mostly written in the Epistolary Style, chiefly upon Moral Subjects, And particularly calculated for the Improvement of Younger Minds. It was published in two volumes...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Deverell
MD
has an acute sense of the way women are disadvantaged. She is, she confesses, a rebel against the domestic sphere.
Deverell, Mary. Miscellanies in Prose and Verse. Printed for the author by J. Rivington, Jun.
1: 43
Of all the faults, that were ever laid to the charge of...
Publishing
Mary Deverell
MD
had apparently finished this poem in draft by 1782.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Samuel Johnson
, on the other hand, called SDthe Directress of rational conversation,
Johnson, Samuel. The Letters of Samuel Johnson. Editor Redford, Bruce, Princeton University Press.
4: 147
which sounds as if he was siding here with his friend Lennox rather than with his friends Burney and...
Textual Production
Susannah Dobson
Samuel Johnson
supposed, nearly a decade after its production, that The Life of Théodore Agrippa d'Aubigné, 1772, was by SD
: actually it was the last work of Sarah Scott
, who always published anonymously.
Johnson, Samuel. The Letters of Samuel Johnson. Editor Redford, Bruce, Princeton University Press.
4: 147
Occupation
John Donne
During the later seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries Donne's writings were largely forgotten or disapproved of. In June 1741 the London Magazine printed a regularised (to modern eyes butchered) version of Goe, and catche a...
Literary responses
May Drummond
Thomas Story
said that at the beginning of her preaching career MD
had a Turn of Expression . . . very taking to most Hearers, especially the more polite sort of both Sexes,
Story, Thomas.
720
and...
politics
John Dryden
By the time this poem saw print, the inadequacy of the Cromwell dynasty was becoming apparent, and Dryden's next important poem hailed the return of Charles II
. It is hardly fair to call him...
Performance of text
Maria Edgeworth
The Edgeworth family acted, for visitors, ME
's comedy The Double Disguise, which remained unprinted until 2014. Edgeworth herself performed as a servant named (after a character in Johnson
's Idler) Betty Broom.
Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Clarendon.
152
Russo, Stephanie. “The Double Disguise”. Women’s Writing, Vol.
22
, No. 4, pp. 531-3.
531
Leisure and Society
Maria Edgeworth
John Downman
painted an attractive half-length portrait of her in watercolour and pencil (now at Princeton University
) in 1807. After it changed hands at the Peyraud
sale in 2009, a reproduction of it was...
Reception
Amelia B. Edwards
John Cordy Jeaffreson
gave two full Athenæum columns to Half-a-Million of Money, but largely in order to complain that in spite of its unusual plot the novel was essentially derivative, and sapped his confidence...
Textual Production
Elizabeth (Cavendish) Egerton, Countess of Bridgewater
The present BL
Egerton MS 607 was at one time owned by the author's descendant Samuel Egerton Brydges
. Two contemporary copies of this manuscript, one of them with extensive and important annotation by the...
Family and Intimate relationships
Anne Katharine Elwood
AKE
's maternal grandmother, Mary (Jacob) Barrett
, was a Kentish woman who had been a friend of the bluestocking Elizabeth Carter
, while her husband belonged (possibly through her) to Carter's literary circle, and...
Residence
Ruth Fainlight
The house, reached by a steep cart-track with hairpin bends, stood in an olive grove with a grapevine over the door. RF
went back to England the following autumn, and was still there when Sillitoe...