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.
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...
Publishing
Mary Deverell
MD
had apparently finished this poem in draft by 1782.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
AS
published an anonymous and in the main uncomplimentary Character of the recently-dead Samuel Johnson
(a kind of obituary) in the General Evening Post.
Ashmun, Margaret. The Singing Swan. Yale University Press; H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1931.
111
Publishing
Anna Seward
AS
wrote, as Benvolio, a series of letters for the Gentleman's Magazine, cutting Johnson
down to size in response to Boswell
's Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides.
Ashmun, Margaret. The Singing Swan. Yale University Press; H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1931.
139-42
Publishing
Catherine Talbot
CT
contributed to number 30 of Samuel Johnson
's The Rambler, a letter from Sunday.
Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Clarendon, 1990.
214
Fairer, David. “Authorship Problems in The AdventurerReview of English Studies, Vol.
n.s. 25
, No. 98, 1974, pp. 137-51.
143
Publishing
Anna Seward
AS
contributed to debate on Boswell
's Life of Johnson with extracts in the Gentleman's Magazine from her correspondence about Johnson with William Hayley
, dating from 1782.
Ashmun, Margaret. The Singing Swan. Yale University Press; H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1931.
143, 201-3
Publishing
Elizabeth Carter
The book had gone to press in June 1757.
Feminist Companion Archive.
The original press run of 1,018 copies had to be supplemented with a further 250. First of several more editions was the Dublin one of the...
Publishing
Frances Reynolds
FR
showed a draft of An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste and of the Origin of our Ideas of Beauty, &c to Samuel Johnson
: he pressed her to publish it, but to revise...
Publishing
Mary Masters
This volume was printed for the Author. Its 833 subscribers (for 903 copies)
qtd. in
Fleeman, John David, and James McLaverty. A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson. Clarendon Press, 2000, 2 vols.
EKM
's didactic children's book The West-Indian; or, Anecdotes of the Somerville Family was published at Derby, as by Mrs C. Mathews, with a title-page quotation from Samuel Johnson
.
Mathews, Eliza Kirkham. The West-Indian. H. Mozley, 1821.
title-page
Publishing
Mary Deverell
A dedication to the Princess Royal praises the immortal writings of many other women, or rather ladies. MD
herself, she says, is a person of obscure and undistinguished rank, who yet hath not reliquished the...
Publishing
Charlotte Lennox
CL
printed proposals (written for her by Johnson
) for a subscription edition of her collected Works; but nothing came of this.
Isles, Duncan. “The Lennox Collection”. Harvard Library Bulletin, Vol.
18
, No. 4, Oct. 1970, pp. 317-44.
327
Fleeman, John David, and James McLaverty. A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson. Clarendon Press, 2000, 2 vols.
2: 1240
Publishing
Elizabeth Carter
EC
made her first contribution to Samuel Johnson
's first essay series, The Rambler.
Johnson, Samuel. The Rambler. Editors Bate, Walter Jackson and Albrecht B. Strauss, Yale, Yale University Press, 1969, 3 vols.
1: 237ff
Publishing
Mary Deverell
Her full title was Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, mostly written in the Epistolary Style, chiefly upon Moral Subjects, And particularly calculated for the Improvement of Younger Minds. It was published in two volumes...
Reception
Hannah More
Some lines from Sensibility were quoted as caption below a print of Johnson
; HM
saw this print on a wall at Pembroke College
when visiting Oxford with him in June 1782.
Jones, Mary Gwladys. Hannah More. Cambridge University Press, 1952.
