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.
This 70-page pamphlet, addressed to Parliament
, exhibits detailed knowledge of the law and of recent cases involving heiress marriage, adultery, etc. SC
finds the English law harsher to women than either ancient Roman or...
Literary responses
Charlotte Charke
The Gentleman's Magazine devoted more space to CC
's book this year than to any other new work, though these included Johnson
's Dictionary and Voltaire
's History and State of Europe.
Baruth, Philip E. “Who Is Charlotte Charke?”. Introducing Charlotte Charke: Actress, Author, Enigma, edited by Philip E. Baruth, University of Illinois Press, pp. 9-62.
4
It...
Education
Lydia Maria Child
At fifteen she read Paradise Lost (with her brother's encouragement) and was delighted with its grandeur and sublimity, but was bold enough to criticise Milton
for assert[ing] the superiority of his own sex in rather...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Collier
The Monthly Review was moderately laudatory about the Art of Tormenting; it picked up on the relationship to Swift
.
Griffiths, Ralph, and George Edward Griffiths, editors. Monthly Review. R. Griffiths.
8 (1753): 274
JC
's commonplace-book commented wryly on a man who declared that...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Collier
Johnson
incorporated three quotations from the Art of Tormenting in his Dictionary—a marker of deeply the book impressed him.
Brewer, Charlotte. “’A Goose Quill or a Gander’s?’: Female Writers in Johnson’s Dictionary”. Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl="m">Dictionary</span>, edited by Freya Johnston and Lynda Mugglestone, Oxford University Press, pp. 120-39.
124, 129
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Cooper
EC
's book was generally respected. It was praised by Mary Scott
, and had a significant impact on Thomas Chatterton
Bronson, Bertrand H. “Chattertoniana”. Modern Language Quarterly, Vol.
11
, pp. 417-24.
417
as well as, perhaps, on Johnson
's format in his Lives of the...
Leisure and Society
Maria Susanna Cooper
MSC
kept up with contemporary publications. She asked her son Astley to send her from London the latest volume of Johnson
's edition of Shakespeare
Cooper, Bransby Blake. The Life of Sir Astley Cooper, Bart. John W. Parker.
She quoted Johnson
on her title-page (on the value and usefulness of familiar histories), and acknowledged her sex in the preface. The book is now rare in both its first edition and the second (published...
Residence
Abraham Cowley
Biographer Samuel Johnson
was inclined to make fun of AC
's somewhat self-conscious retirement from London to the village of Chertsey in Surrey as escapist, whether it was the pressure of success or the disappointment...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Whateley Darwall
Liberty borrows from Johnson
's newly-published Rasselas the idea of a happy confinement which is not happy. It laments the poet's lack of autonomy.
Messenger, Ann. Woman and Poet in the Eighteenth Century: The Life of Mary Whateley Darwall (1738-1825). AMS Press.
24ff
Textual Features
Anita Desai
In The Indian Writer's Problems (which appeared in Quest in 1970 and in the Literary Criterion in 1975, and was reprinted in Perspectives on Anita Desai), she remarks that English is the language that...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Deverell
MD
has an acute sense of the way women are disadvantaged. She is, she confesses, a rebel against the domestic sphere.
Deverell, Mary. Miscellanies in Prose and Verse. Printed for the author by J. Rivington, Jun.
1: 43
Of all the faults, that were ever laid to the charge of...
