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 idiosyncratic humour is well shown in The Toad's Journal. A moral passage at the end of this poem, in a different metre, draws a moral against idleness, or living in vain; but the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Collier
The Monthly Review was moderately laudatory about the Art of Tormenting; it picked up on the relationship to Swift
.
Griffiths, Ralph, and George Edward Griffiths, editors. Monthly Review. R. Griffiths.
8 (1753): 274
JC
's commonplace-book commented wryly on a man who declared that...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Hays
Among the book's contents are poems and fiction (including dream visions and an Oriental tale. Titles like Cleora, or the Misery Attending Unsuitable Connections and Josepha, or pernicious Effects of early Indulgence foreground Hays's didactic...
Intertextuality and Influence
Henrietta Battier
She hoped to get a volume of her collected poems published while she was in London in 1784, and enlisted the aid of Samuel Johnson. Johnson
offered positive encouragement (assuring her he had often been...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Carter
The reviewers of this collection were appreciative; the Critical's high praise included, however, heavy emphasis on gender.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall.
12 (1762): 180-3
This monthly number of the Critical appeared with its date (1762) misprinted as 1761...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Grant
As well as her central allusion to Barbauld, AG
claims authority for her work by quoting Milton
on her title-page and later as well, and by echoing, in her deliberately derivative, that is traditional style...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Austen
She applies to her friend a remark about Samuel Johnson
from Boswell
's Life: that her death left no-one living who resembled her.
Austen, Jane. Minor Works. Editor Chapman, Robert William, Oxford University Press.
440-2
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Collier
Johnson
incorporated three quotations from the Art of Tormenting in his Dictionary—a marker of deeply the book impressed him.
Brewer, Charlotte. “’A Goose Quill or a Gander’s?’: Female Writers in Johnson’s Dictionary”. Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl="m">Dictionary</span>, edited by Freya Johnston and Lynda Mugglestone, Oxford University Press, pp. 120-39.
124, 129
Intertextuality and Influence
Susanna Haswell Rowson
The title-page quotes Samuel Johnson
asserting that an author has nothing but his own merits to stand or fall on. The Birth of Genius, an irregular ode, offers advice to my son to love...
Leisure and Society
Joanna Baillie
In the earlier 1840s, however, she was still a keen reader. She tackled the first edition of Frances Burney
's Diary and Letters out of a desire to get some insight into the literary society...
Leisure and Society
Maria Susanna Cooper
MSC
kept up with contemporary publications. She asked her son Astley to send her from London the latest volume of Johnson
's edition of Shakespeare
Cooper, Bransby Blake. The Life of Sir Astley Cooper, Bart. John W. Parker.
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...
Leisure and Society
Margaret Bingham, Countess Lucan
Her bluestocking assembly, which ran from at least 1781, was modelled on that of her husband's relation Elizabeth Vesey
. Anti-bluestocking prejudice may perhaps have fed into her daughter's problems with her mother-in-law, and the...
Leisure and Society
Elizabeth Carter
Joseph Highmore
painted EC
in about 1738, holding a book in her hand and about to be crowned with a laurel wreath. This picture seems to be related to Samuel Johnson
's poem To Eliza...
Leisure and Society
Hester Lynch Piozzi
The National Portrait Gallery
lists twelve portraits of HLP
, dated 1781 to 1811 (though some of these derive from each other and a couple are conversation-piece prints). Sir Joshua Reynolds
painted her with her...