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.
Anna Aikin's allegory The Hill of Science seems both to derive from and to comment on Johnson
's Vision of Theodore, while her On Romances is a piece of literary criticism in a pastiche...
Literary responses
Anna Letitia Barbauld
Excellent reviews included William Woodfall
decisively classifying the sister as of a higher genius than the brother.
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
113
Johnson
(a frequent target of parodists) thought ALB
's the best imitation of him that he had...
Literary responses
Anna Letitia Barbauld
The Critical Review gave high praise to each of the series. So did the Monthly, which also cracked her anonymity from the beginning.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall.
46 (1778): 160; 47 (1779): 320
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
191-2
Vulnerable as a Dissenter,...
Textual Features
Anna Letitia Barbauld
Here ALB
achieves a note of near-tragic dignity in face of political defeat—a note reminiscent of the weight and complexity of Johnson
's satires or of the recognition of defeat in her own Corsica.
Literary responses
Anna Letitia Barbauld
Recently William McCarthy
has pronounced this poem seldom matched for conceptual density. (He cites as its peers in this respect Johnson
's The Vanity of Human Wishes and Ann Yearsley
's Addressed to Ignorance.)
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
475
Intertextuality and Influence
Anna Letitia Barbauld
The collection includes her Biographical Account of That Author, and Observations on His Writings, her longest single extant work, Johnsonian
in manner, taking a critical attitude towards its sources. Her editorial alterations were extremely...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Bannerman
The contents included odes, sonnets (including one sequence from Petrarch
and another based on Goethe
's Werther, in which she speaks as the male lover of a woman, with notes relating her poems to...
Textual Production
Beryl Bainbridge
BB
published another historical novel, According to Queeney, about Hester Thrale
and Samuel Johnson
, whose narrative sticks unusually close to its sources.
Eilenberg, Susan. “Leaf, Button, Dog”. London Review of Books, pp. 13-15.
13
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.
King, Brendan. Beryl Bainbridge. Bloomsbury .
197
She began a...
Performance of text
Beryl Bainbridge
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.
King, Brendan. Beryl Bainbridge. Bloomsbury .
463-4
Leisure and Society
Joanna Baillie
In the earlier 1840s, however, she was still a keen reader. She tackled the first edition of Frances Burney
's Diary and Letters out of a desire to get some insight into the literary society...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Austen
She applies to her friend a remark about Samuel Johnson
from Boswell
's Life: that her death left no-one living who resembled her.
Austen, Jane. Minor Works. Editor Chapman, Robert William, Oxford University Press.
440-2
Textual Production
Margaret Atwood
Payback opened a new seam in Atwood's continuing output of journalism. Her essay Our faith is fraying in the god of money, in the Financial Times of 13 April 2012, tellingly applies a passage...
Literary responses
Anne Askew
Knowledge of AA
's writing spread rapidly. The reactionary Stephen Gardiner
, Bishop of Winchester, complained on 6 June 1547 of the number of copies in circulation.
Beilin, Elaine V., and Anne Askew. “Introduction”. The Examinations of Anne Askew, Oxford University Press.
This book is a prequel to some of its predecessors. Brazil in South America (here called New Cumbria in Roman America) is another transformation of actuality, ruled over by the sinister Queen Ginevra. Dido arrives...