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.
Recently William McCarthy
has pronounced this poem seldom matched for conceptual density. (He cites as its peers in this respect Johnson
's The Vanity of Human Wishes and Ann Yearsley
's Addressed to Ignorance.)
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
475
Literary responses
Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins
It received an excellent review from the Critical, which said that although the writer was (unsurprisingly) not the equal of Samuel Johnson
in the The Idlerin pointed disquisition and strength of mind: she...
Literary responses
Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins
Anne Grant
was particularly enthusiastic. She said she could give a whole summer to this novel: they will tell you it is dry at first, and long throughout. The first volume you will find sterile...
Literary responses
Charlotte Charke
The Gentleman's Magazine devoted more space to CC
's book this year than to any other new work, though these included Johnson
's Dictionary and Voltaire
's History and State of Europe.
Baruth, Philip E. “Who Is Charlotte Charke?”. Introducing Charlotte Charke: Actress, Author, Enigma, edited by Philip E. Baruth, University of Illinois Press, 1998, pp. 9-62.
4
It...
Literary responses
Charlotte Lennox
The favourable review in the Literary Magazine (with which Johnson
was closely connected) probably owed something to his influence.
Fleeman, John David, and James McLaverty. A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson. Clarendon Press, 2000, 2 vols.
1: 710
Oliver Goldsmith
, reviewing Lennox's work for the Monthly Review in July 1757, makes...
Literary responses
Anne Askew
Knowledge of AA
's writing spread rapidly. The reactionary Stephen Gardiner
, Bishop of Winchester, complained on 6 June 1547 of the number of copies in circulation.
Beilin, Elaine V., and Anne Askew. “Introduction”. The Examinations of Anne Askew, Oxford University Press, 1996.
Clifford, James L. Hester Lynch Piozzi (Mrs Thrale). Clarendon Press, 1987.
61
Literary responses
Frances Sheridan
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 patriotism of EM
's riposte ensured its enthusiastic reception. Readers (among them a brother of Elizabeth Carter
, who refrained from enlightening him) assumed that the anonymity of this authoritative critical voice concealed a...
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 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
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...
