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.
When Richardson offered her a list of examples of filial disobedience, she replied that no doubt an equally heinous list could be produced of parental oppression. With Carter
she mulled over religious and literary questions...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Priscilla Wakefield
Despite the title, the travel in this sequel or companion to The Juvenile Travellers confines itself to the British Isles, where one of the most pressing topics of local interest is association with writers...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Hester Lynch Piozzi
Her annotations were a vehicle for her own reminiscences and critical writing. When she marked up her copy of Boswell
's Life of Johnson she contradicted Boswell regularly, offering evidence or reasoning to prove his...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Anne Grant
Her range of literary reference and comment is wide: as well as Richardson
(whose Clarissa she unequivocally praises),
Grant, Anne. Letters from the Mountains. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme.
2: 45-8
it encompasses Blair
, Sterne
and Smollett
as travel-writers, and Homer
. Grant charges Samuel Johnson
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Anne Grant
She likes her reading to be strenuous: she recommends Jane Austen
's Mansfield Park as light reading,
Grant, Anne. Memoir and Correspondence of Mrs. Grant of Laggan. Editor Grant, John Peter, Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans.
Cokayne, George Edward. The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, extant, extinct, or dormant. Editor Gibbs, Vicary, St Catherine Press.
In opening and closing she invokes Samuel Johnson
(a travel writer more interested in the...
Textual Production
Virginia Woolf
Later reprints often appeared as The Common Reader, First Series. VW
took her title from a formulation of Samuel Johnson
's, meaning that non-specialist, non-academic reader to whose taste, said Johnson, he was always...
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Jan Morris
More than a decade later, in 1978, JM
followed her own portrait of Oxford by editing The Oxford Book of Oxford, a quirky anthology of often very short anecdotes and other excerpts, aimed less...
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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...
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Hester Lynch Piozzi
Back in England, HLP
published her edition of Letters to and from the Late Samuel Johnson.
Clifford, James L. Hester Lynch Piozzi (Mrs Thrale). Clarendon Press.
314
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Margaret Atwood
Payback opened a new seam in Atwood's continuing output of journalism. Her essay Our faith is fraying in the god of money, in the Financial Times of 13 April 2012, tellingly applies a passage...
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Jane Marcet
The full title is Conversations on the Evidences of Christianity, in which the Leading Arguments of the Best Author are Arranged, Developed, and Connected with Each Other. For the Use of Young Persons and Theological...
Textual Production
Anne Finch
One passage from a long Pindaric ode entitled All is Vanity (present in Finch's early octavo ms and in her printed collection) has broken loose and achieved a life of its own. Whereas the entire...
Timeline
27 June 1777: The clergyman William Dodd was executed for...
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27 June 1777
The clergyman William Dodd
was executed for forgery despite the efforts of many distinguished people to win him a pardon.
15 January 1778: A Scottish court found in favour of Joseph...
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15 January 1778
A Scottish court found in favour of Joseph Knight
, a slave of African origin who had been brought to Scotland and now sued for his liberty. In effect this abolished slavery in Scotland: a...
By September 1782: The Letters of the black Londoner Ignatius...
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By September 1782
The Letters of the black Londoner Ignatius Sancho
were published two years after the author's death.
7 November 1783: The last public hanging took place at Tyburn...
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7 November 1783
The last public hanging took place at Tyburn in London (near where Marble Arch now stands), putting an end to the practice of parading the condemned through town en route to the scene of execution.
1 October 1785: The year after Johnson's death, Boswell published...
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1 October 1785
The year after Johnson
's death, Boswell
published The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.
7 December 1789: Hester Lynch Piozzi heard the African John...
April 1791: The month before the appearance of his Life...
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April 1791
The month before the appearance of his Life of Samuel Johnson
, and as parliament debated the bill to abolish slavery, James Boswell
published a long poem entitled No Abolition of Slavery; or, The Universal...
16 May 1791: James Boswell published The Life of Samuel...
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16 May 1791
James Boswell
published The Life of Samuel Johnson, on the twenty-eighth anniversary of the day that he and Johnson first met.
March 1824-May 1829: Walter Savage Landor published Imaginary...
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March 1824-May 1829
Walter Savage Landor
published Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen.
February 1906: Publisher J. M. Dent launched Everyman's...