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 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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Heyrick
Both the title-page and the body of the work quote (unascribed) lines about social injustice spoken by Shakespeare
's King Lear (who has only just realised the rampant injustice of the world and of his...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Murray
The material already printed in 1799 was considerably re-arranged in 1803, and some of it moved to the second volume. SM
opens by describing the better route she has discovered for leaving London. She...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anna Letitia Barbauld
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Catherine Talbot
This essay, an answer to number 11, which had taken the form of a letter from To-day, displays CT
's characteristic whimsical ingenuity. Night, claiming to be the elder sister of Today, defends dark...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth B. Lester
This work quotes Cowper
on the title-page. The short stories (genuinely short this time) include A Few Days from My Journal (which opens with Johnson
's well-known remark to Boswell
about the pleasure of driving...
Intertextuality and Influence
Medora Gordon Byron
The title-page quotes Milton
's Paradise Lost (There wanted yet the master-work); the preface quotes Samuel Johnson
saying that the novelist needs to have first-hand experience of the living world, but that...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Latter
ML
here accords honorific citation to Dryden
and Pope
,
Latter, Mary. Pro & Con. T. Lowndes, 1771.
31-2
repeated mockery to the over-long words she sees as favoured by Dr Johnson
,
The novel combines domestic humour and social satire. The courtship of Eglantine Fortescue and the young officer Augustus Fitzroy is almost overshadowed by the broad-brush picture of their families and friends. Eglantine incurs disapproval first...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anna Eliza Bray
From an early age, AEB
admired Samuel Johnson
's style and adopted elements of his writing methods for her own career, such as keeping a journal of progress.
Bray, Anna Eliza. “Introduction”. Autobiography of Anna Eliza Bray, edited by John A. Kempe, Chapman and Hall, 1884, pp. 1-36.
26
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Masters
The poem here entitled The Vanity of Human Life must have been at least known to Johnson
long before he wrote his own Vanity of Human Wishes, 1749. Clemene's Character aroused the ire of...
Intertextuality and Influence
Medora Gordon Byron
This novel turns on a favourite Byron theme: the contrast between domestic and fashionable life. It opens, Above five hundred cards had announced to the fashionable world that lady Cheveril would be at home. It...
Intertextuality and Influence
Harriet Lee
The preface says that a woman, Precluded, by Sex, from the deep Observation of Life, which gives Strength to Character, feels inevitable Apprehensions . . . on making a first Effort in the Drama.
Lee, Harriet. The New Peerage. G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1787.
prelims
Intertextuality and Influence
Charlotte Nooth
The governess Matilda regrets that there are no professions for women; nothing is to be done but by the sacrifice of our rank in society.
Nooth, Charlotte. Eglantine; or, The Family of Fortescue. Valpy, 1816, 2 vols.
1: 199
She calls herself quite a detached being, alone...
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, 1999.