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.
The title-page quotes Samuel Johnson
asserting that an author has nothing but his own merits to stand or fall on. The Birth of Genius, an irregular ode, offers advice to my son to love...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Singer Rowe
Samuel Johnson
, in his review of Elizabeth Harrison
's Miscellanies on Moral and Religious Subjects, in Prose and Verse, written for the Literary Magazine, or Universal Review in October 1756, went out of...
Intertextuality and Influence
Frances Arabella Rowden
The notes explain many classical allusions and some to more recent literature. The Maid of Greenland, for instance, is Ajut, in Johnson
's Rambler essays 186 and 187.
Rowden, Frances Arabella. The Pleasures of Friendship. A Poem.
104
Intertextuality and Influence
Emma Robinson
In print ER
's play was accompanied by a preface written in the voice of a young-Turk satirist. It is a piece that could hardly have appeared at this date under a woman's name, and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Robinson
MR
's preface quotes that of Charlotte Smith
to her Elegiac Sonnets.
Robinson, Mary. “Introduction”. Mary Robinson: Selected Poems, edited by Judith Pascoe, Broadview, pp. 19-64.
45
She presents her own work as one of scholarship, explaining that by legitimate in her title she means the sonnet in...
Friends, Associates
Radagunda Roberts
Though very little is known of RR
's life, she was well acquainted with at least one other woman writer: Frances Brooke
(whose son attended St Paul's while Roberts's brother was High Master, and who...
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...
Textual Production
Frances Reynolds
A manuscript of this in the Hyde Collection (now at the Houghton Library
, Harvard
) bears revisions by Samuel Johnson
, in red ink which he told FR
she could easily remove with water...
Textual Production
Frances Reynolds
Johnson
found at this stage a good deal to criticize but also much to praise. The work possessed, he said, such force of comprehension, and such nicety of observation as Locke
or Pascal
might be...
Intertextuality and Influence
Frances Reynolds
With this rejection of the straight line, or of the phallic, she turns to feminine sensibility on which to ground her principles of taste or of aesthetics. The remarkable result must be called a proto-feminist...
Publishing
Frances Reynolds
FR
showed a draft of An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste and of the Origin of our Ideas of Beauty, &c to Samuel Johnson
: he pressed her to publish it, but to revise...
Textual Production
Frances Reynolds
Most . . . but not all
Hill, George Birkbeck, editor. Johnsonian Miscellanies. Clarendon Press.
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...
Author summary
Frances Reynolds
FR
, active in the later eighteenth century, was the author of poems (one printed), a published treatise on aesthetics, essays diary entries, and a memoir of Samuel Johnson
which reached print years after her...
Occupation
Frances Reynolds
Samuel Johnson
was eager to sit for her, and did so on three occasions: in March 1775, in June 1780, and in summer 1783. He may have been sitting for her on the day before...
Friends, Associates
Frances Reynolds
FR
became a good friend of Samuel Johnson
, who by late 1764 was writing to her as My Dearest Dear.
Johnson, Samuel. The Letters of Samuel Johnson. Editor Redford, Bruce, Princeton University Press.
1: 246
He also distinguished her with a nickname, Renny. One of...