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.
Carlile, Susan. Charlotte Lennox. An Independent Mind. University of Toronto Press, 2018.
202
but the dates make this highly unlikely.
her sister became an intellectual...
Occupation
Frances Reynolds
Samuel Johnson
was eager to sit for her, and did so on three occasions: in March 1775, in June 1780, and in summer 1783. He may have been sitting for her on the day before...
Occupation
Frances Brooke
She was accompanied and supported in presenting her petition by Samuel Johnson
. She was trying to secure for the colony schools for both sexes, missionaries for the natives, and money to give some style...
Occupation
Elizabeth Carter
Though unmarried, EC
was not without domestic responsibilities. Even after her father's second marriage she had household tasks. She made puddings and sewed shirts; and she tutored her half-brother Henry, twenty-one years her junior, to...
Occupation
Philip Dormer Stanhope fourth Earl of Chesterfield
An incident, trivial to himself but still remembered, is Chesterfield's record as patron of Samuel Johnson
's Dictionary project. He offered no help during Johnson's nine years of work, but printed two misleading pre-publication essays...
Occupation
Barbara Pym
This work gave her considerable free time, most of which she spent reading such authors as Austen
, Johnson
, Scott
, and Trollope
. She particularly admired the forms of Mansfield
's published scrapbook...
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...
Occupation
Beryl Bainbridge
BB
was a striking and accomplished visual artist, though she tended to speak slightingly of her own work. Early in her marriage to Austin Davies she exhibited her work alongside his.
The Edgeworth family acted, for visitors, ME
's comedy The Double Disguise, which remained unprinted until 2014. Edgeworth herself performed as a servant named (after a character in Johnson
's Idler) Betty Broom.
Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Clarendon, 1972.
152
Russo, Stephanie. “The Double Disguise”. Women’s Writing, Vol.
22
, No. 4, Nov. 2015, pp. 531-3.
531
Performance of text
Madeleine Lucette Ryley
MLR
's five-act historical melodrama, Richard Savage, which is based on Samuel Johnson
's biography of the talented, self-destructive poet, opened at the Lyceum
in New York.
Engle, Sherry D. New Women Dramatists in America, 1890-1920. Palgrave MacMilan, 2007.
In a spin-off from According to Queeney, BB
wrote a theatre sketch about Johnson
and Thrale
, with music, which she and Richard Ingrams
performed together at Stoke-on-Trent on 15 August 2002.
They believed that women could think and write in freedom only outside relationships with men. Although Mary Astell
's writing influenced them, they insisted that women must be involved in society and not withdraw into...
politics
John Dryden
By the time this poem saw print, the inadequacy of the Cromwell dynasty was becoming apparent, and Dryden's next important poem hailed the return of Charles II
. It is hardly fair to call him...
Author summary
Frances Reynolds
FR
, active in the later eighteenth century, was the author of poems (one printed), a published treatise on aesthetics, essays diary entries, and a memoir of Samuel Johnson
which reached print years after her...
Author summary
Ellis Cornelia Knight
ECK
, whose life was lived close to some makers of history during the French Revolutionary period and later, indulged her scholarly or literary bent in unusual or pioneering genres: a sequel to Samuel Johnson
