Samuel Richardson

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Standard Name: Richardson, Samuel
SR 's three epistolary novels, published between 1740 and 1753, exerted an influence on women's writing which was probably stronger than that of any other novelist, male or female, of the century. He also facilitated women's literary careers in his capacity as member of the publishing trade, and published a letter-writing manual and a advice-book for printers' apprentices.
Stipple engraving of Samuel Richardson, used by Anna Letitia Barbauld in her edition of Richardson's correspondence. He is standing with his right hand tucked into his jacket and a book in his left hand; in the related painting by Joseph Highmore, Richardson holds a paper instead of a book.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Textual Production Eliza Haywood
EH was early in the field of adverse comment on Samuel Richardson 's Pamela, with a burlesque fiction, Anti-Pamela; or, Feign'd Innocence Detected.
Spedding, Patrick. A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood. Pickering and Chatto, 2003.
353-60
Haywood, Eliza. “Introduction and Chronology of Events in Eliza Haywood’s Life”. The Injur’d Husband, or, The Mistaken Resentment; and, Lasselia, or, The Self-Abandon’d, edited by Jerry C. Beasley, University Press of Kentucky, 1999, p. ix - xlii.
xli
Textual Production Jane Johnson
JJ interrupted a letter of tentative moral advice to her friend Mrs Brompton, to cast her thoughts into fiction: The History of Miss Clarissa of Buckinghamshire, who is descended from Richardson 's Clarissa, but...
Textual Production Frances Brooke
Susanna Duncombe offered FB permission to use (for her life of Richardson ) Duncombe's now well-known sketch of him reading aloud.
McMullen, Lorraine. An Odd Attempt in a Woman: The Literary Life of Frances Brooke. University of British Columbia Press, 1983.
188
Textual Production Charlotte Lennox
She had written most of it by November 1751. With Johnson as mediator, she consulted Richardson about revisions, denouement, optimum length (she reduced her plan from three volumes to two), and about her choice of...
Textual Features Charlotte Lennox
Arabella is a reading heroine. Brought up on her dead mother's collection of French romances, she has been savouring a universal power over men, which exists only in her imagination. For this reason she scorns...
Textual Features Susan Smythies
An Advertisement to the Reader likens itself to a bill of fare or menu. SS launches a defence of novels, specifically novels by women, in notably low-key style. Admitting that she is now guilty of...
Textual Features Jane Johnson
She writes of women's virtues as domestic ones, and the family as the proper province for private women to shine in. Whyman likens her letters, in their aim and scope, to those of Richardson ...
Textual Features Jane Collier
The commonplace-book throws light on Collier's other extant writings as well. A casual mention of what Sally calls the Turba proves definitively that at least one neologism in The Cry stemmed not from her but...
Textual Features Sarah Scott
The French heroine tells her own life-story. Her mother dies at her birth. Among various persecutions, she is abducted and imprisoned in one of those rooms, not uncommonly found in old castles, where the owner...
Textual Features Alethea Lewis
She heads her novel with a prefatory letter to the Rev. William Johnstone , who, she says, has asked why she chooses to write fiction and not moral essays. She answers that novels offer opportunities...
Textual Features Anne Grant
AG is a conscious artist as a letter-writer, playing with the influence not only of Richardson but also, in later years, of Hugh Blair 's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. The earliest letters...
Textual Features Anna Letitia Barbauld
The series has a general introduction, On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing, and a Preface, Biographical and Critical for each novelist, which in its echo of the full and original title of Johnson's...
Textual Features Frances Burney
Evelina opens with an ode to Charles Burney (unnamed) as Author of my Being, which sounds like an apology for having written.
Doody, Margaret Anne. Frances Burney: The Life in the Works. Cambridge University Press, 1988.
37
The preface acknowledges the formative influence of Richardson (as well as Henry Fielding
Textual Features Harriet Smythies
In a critical preface HS reveals her gender though not her name. She opens by invoking the author of Rienzi (either, Mary Russell Mitford or Edward Bulwer Lytton ). The two groups of lovers and...
Textual Features Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
They include a novel in five letters (Indamora to Lindamira), a verse-and-prose romance (The Adventurer), and poems in various pastoral and classical modes—epistles, lyrics, etc. The novel gives a voice to...

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