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.
After a few more years in unidentified lodgings, presumably with her father, AW
was invited to share the spacious house which Samuel Johnson
had just taken for work on his Dictionary, in Gough Square...
Residence
Ruth Fainlight
The house, reached by a steep cart-track with hairpin bends, stood in an olive grove with a grapevine over the door. RF
went back to England the following autumn, and was still there when Sillitoe...
Textual Features
Mary Hays
The title-page quotes Johnson
on the efficacy of education: Let it be remembered, that the efficacy of ignorance has been long tried, and has not produced the consequences expected. Let knowledge therefore take its turn...
This first chapter goes well beyond outlining the provision of characters or proper wages for different classes of servants, venturing advice on the art of conversation and social etiquette. IB
quotes Samuel Johnson
on men's...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Griffith
To modern readers EG
's moral-hunting may seem beside the point, but like Elizabeth Montagu
(whom she cites admiringly as having given her courage for her own attempt) and theBowdlers
, she was interpreting...
Textual Features
Frances Burney
Evelina opens with an ode to Charles Burney
(unnamed) as Author of my Being, which sounds like an apology for having written.
Doody, Margaret Anne. Frances Burney: The Life in the Works. Cambridge University Press, 1988.
She heads her novel with a prefatory letter to the Rev. William Johnstone
, who, she says, has asked why she chooses to write fiction and not moral essays. She answers that novels offer opportunities...
Textual Features
Adelaide O'Keeffe
The list of correspondents is indeed potentially helpful, since the cast of characters is complicated. Six people exchange letters about the education of a boy and a girl, Dudley Clonmore and Claudy Howard, on the...
Textual Features
Janet Little
She consistently takes a challenging stance in face of authority. Ironically (in view of Johnson's championing of women writers and Burns's snobbish attitude about herself) she uses Samuel Johnson
as a symbol of the tyrant-critic...
Textual Features
Frances Burney
This novel adopts the point of view of an omniscient, often moralising, narrator. Its language has been often criticised as Johnson
ian. It has in fact little in common with Johnson's style, though it betrays...
Textual Features
B. M. Croker
With great daring she sets out for a new world and new life, after a terminal, blazing row with the governess and the rector, still more or less a headstrong child. On the train for...
Textual Features
Mary Masters
MM
's poems here include those from the Gentleman's Magazine, sweepingly revised. There is, however, contrary to rumour, no specific internal or external evidence to suggest that Johnson
had any hand in the revision...
Textual Features
Anne Dacier
She insists on admiring the presumed simplicity of manners in the Homeric age in preference to modern, civilized, sophisticated society. Her key image for Homer
's style—of wild, luxuriant, varied growth, the opposite of a...
Textual Features
Catherine Talbot
CT
's letters often convey her literary opinions, discussing writing by, for instance, Marie de Sévigné
, Richardson
, Henry Fielding
and Samuel Johnson
. She also writes of the details of her daily life...
