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.
When Richardson offered her a list of examples of filial disobedience, she replied that no doubt an equally heinous list could be produced of parental oppression. With Carter
she mulled over religious and literary questions...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Priscilla Wakefield
Despite the title, the travel in this sequel or companion to The Juvenile Travellers confines itself to the British Isles, where one of the most pressing topics of local interest is association with writers...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Anne Grant
Her range of literary reference and comment is wide: as well as Richardson
(whose Clarissa she unequivocally praises),
Grant, Anne. Letters from the Mountains. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1809, 3 vols.
2: 45-8
it encompasses Blair
, Sterne
and Smollett
as travel-writers, and Homer
. Grant charges Samuel Johnson
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Anne Grant
She likes her reading to be strenuous: she recommends Jane Austen
's Mansfield Park as light reading,
Grant, Anne. Memoir and Correspondence of Mrs. Grant of Laggan. Editor Grant, John Peter, Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1844, 3 vols.
These letters were calculated to contribute to Steuart
's projected but never written book on Jacobite attempts on the throne between the Glorious Revolution and the Rebellion of 1745. They include some comment on women's...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins
This work has been valued chiefly for its anecdotes of Samuel Johnson
and Sir Joshua Reynolds
. LMH
closes the volume on the name of Reynolds
(printed in honorific capitals), in an implicit tribute to...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins
This work extends and deepens the pictures given in her first book of reminiscences both of Johnson
and his circle and of other people including women writers. LMH
expresses admiration for Hester Piozzi
's letter...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Anne Grant
As the title implies, this was written on the model of Anna Letitia Barbauld
's Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, though it also rebukes what AG
would have seen as Barbauld's defeatism and failure of...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Hester Lynch Piozzi
Her annotations were a vehicle for her own reminiscences and critical writing. When she marked up her copy of Boswell
's Life of Johnson she contradicted Boswell regularly, offering evidence or reasoning to prove his...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Frances Burney
Among the pleasures of FB
's life-writing are the way it revels in nonce-words and other innovative uses of language, and the play it makes with dramatic techniques like scene-setting and dialogue. Many famous passages...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Muriel Jaeger
This book is sometimes called a memoir, but its autobiographical moments are only incidental. MJ
's attention is mostly directed towards books and reading; her own experiences of writing, publishing, and having her works performed...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Samuel Beckett
As it stands it focusses less on Thrale than on Anna Williams
and the other women actually resident in Johnson
's household.
Howe, Susanne. Geraldine Jewsbury: Her Life and Errors. George Allen and Unwin, 1935.
72
Beginning in...
Wealth and Poverty
Frances Reynolds
FR
was to all appearances dependent on her brother
for money. He enjoyed the use of his self-made wealth, and commissioned, for instance, a particularly eye-catching carriage, heavily carved and gilded, with the four seasons...
Wealth and Poverty
William Congreve
WC
was blamed (for instance, by Samuel Johnson
in his Lives of the Poets) for leaving a substantial sum of money to the already wealthy duchess although he had needy relations. But the money...
