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.
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
Isabella Beeton
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.
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
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...
Textual Production
Anna Williams
When Boswell
read the elegy On the Death of Stephen Gray
, F. R. S., The Author of the Present Doctrine of Electricity, he at once suspected it was by Johnson
. Williams stoutly...
Textual Production
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, 1987.
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, 1910–1959, 14 vols.
In opening and closing she invokes Samuel Johnson
(a travel writer more interested in the...
Textual Production
Ellis Cornelia Knight
ECK
published her first work, Dinarbas, a novel which acts as a continuation of Samuel Johnson
's Rasselas.
Kolb, Gwin J. “Forward”. Dinarbas, Colleagues Press, 1993.
vii
“Review of Dinarbas by Ellis Cornelia Knight”. The Analytical Review, Vol.
7
, J. Johnson, June 1790, pp. 189-91.
189
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...
Textual Production
Frances Reynolds
Most . . . but not all
Hill, George Birkbeck, editor. Johnsonian Miscellanies. Clarendon Press, 1897, 2 vols.
1: xi
of FR
's Recollections of Dr. Johnson was printed by John Wilson Croker
in his edition of Boswell
's Life of Samuel Johnson, as one...
Textual Production
Barbara Hofland
BH
published The Merchant's Widow and her Family. A Novel, with a title-page quotation from Samuel Johnson
and a date of 1814.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
