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.
The novel in its first form was hugely successful: it brought FS
instant fame. Johnson
teasingly expressed doubts about her moral right to make your readers suffer so much.
qtd. in
Sheridan, Frances. “Introduction”. Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, edited by Jean Coates Cleary et al., World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, 1995.
The Critical Review (to which the author's identity was no secret) said of it that HM
's narrative gift was no contemptible endowment, and that her gaiety of humour was pleasing. It did, however...
Literary responses
Helen Maria Williams
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.
qtd. in
Kennedy, Deborah. Helen Maria Williams and the Age of Revolution. Bucknell University Press, 2002.
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...
Literary responses
Margaret Bingham Countess Lucan
When on 25 April 1778 the topic came up among Samuel Johnson
, Frances Reynolds
, and James Boswell
of a lady's verses on Ireland, it must have been a reference to MBCL
's poem...
Literary responses
Mary Sewell
Sarah Stickney Ellis
remarked (rather censoriously and in a remarkable echo of fictional employers imagined by Samuel Johnson
and by the servant-poet Elizabeth Hands
): I don't know that I should have liked it, if...
Literary responses
Charlotte Lennox
Reviews were excellent, partly on account of the interest of the subject-matter (which Catherine Talbot
for one had found riveting). Johnson
in the Literary Review explicitly praised the style as well.
Carlile, Susan. Charlotte Lennox. An Independent Mind. University of Toronto Press, 2018.
149-50
In January 1757...
Literary responses
Hester Lynch Piozzi
HLP
was one of the twenty-four most-reviewed women writers of 1789-90.
Hawkins, Ann R., and Stephanie Eckroth, editors. Romantic Women Writers Reviewed. Vol. 3 vols., Ashgate Publishing Company, 2011–2013, 3 vols.
Samuel Johnson
, in his review of Elizabeth Harrison
's Miscellanies on Moral and Religious Subjects, in Prose and Verse, written for the Literary Magazine, or Universal Review in October 1756, went out of...
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. The Life of Thomas Story. Isaac Thompson, 1747.
720
and...
Literary responses
Martha Fowke
Already by this date MF
's reputation as a writer had become submerged . . . by scandal and innuendo.
Gerrard, Christine. Aaron Hill: The Muses’ Projector 1685-1750. Oxford University Press, 2003.
71
The same dismissive view of her was later promulgated by Samuel Johnson
. Recent...
Literary Setting
Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins
This odd and intriguing novel is positively eccentric: in the naming of its characters (Mr Bevirode, Mrs Kilgrim), in its exotically melodramatic plot line, and in the way it juxtaposes satire with romance and moralising...
Material Conditions of Writing
Hester Lynch Piozzi
Hester Thrale
composed what is today her best-known letter: a measured, dignified rebuke to Johnson
in reply to his epistolary bellow of pain and rage at the news of her impending second marriage.
Johnson, Samuel, and Hester Lynch Piozzi. The Letters of Samuel Johnson. Editor Chapman, Robert William, Clarendon Press, 1984, 3 vols.
3: 175
Material Conditions of Writing
Hester Lynch Piozzi
From ItalyHLP
arranged the publication of her Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson.
Clifford, James L. Hester Lynch Piozzi (Mrs Thrale). Clarendon Press, 1987.
263
Occupation
Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins
She became amanuensis or secretary for her father
, with only a token wage. But she received £40 for copying and proof-reading his biography of Johnson
.
Hawkins, Laetitia-Matilda. Memoirs, Anecdotes, Facts and Opinions. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, and C. and J. Rivington, 1824, 2 vols.
