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 original title-page quotes Johnson
's Rasselas on the way that the enchantments of fancy belong to the time of youth and vanish with it.
Helme, Elizabeth. Instructive Rambles in London, and the Adjacent Villages. T. N. Longman and E. Newbery, 1798.
title-page
A preface declares EH
's intention of blending instruction...
Intertextuality and Influence
Georgiana Fullerton
In Fullerton's version Charlotte Christine was raised in an idyllic childhood as a wife for royalty before finding herself abused, isolated, and threatened in the Russian Court, caught amidst intrigues between her husband and father-in-law...
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
Hester Lynch Piozzi
She may have been acting on the advice of Johnson
, who believed that social and domestic records were regrettably rare.
Clifford, James L. Hester Lynch Piozzi (Mrs Thrale). Clarendon Press, 1987.
70
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
Cicely Hamilton
CH
took as her text a couplet by Samuel Johnson
: The drama's laws, the drama's patrons give, / For we that live to please, must please to live.
“The Times Digital Archive 1785-2007”. Thompson Gale: The Times Digital Archive.
(5 March 1924): 12
While thoroughly...
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
Ellen Johnston
In contrast to the life-writings of her working-class contemporary Hannah Cullwick
, EJ
's autobiography is remarkably self-reflexive and literary. She says that an account of her life in Dundee alone, her trials, disappointments, joys...
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...
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.
1: 199
She calls herself quite a detached being, alone...
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...
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
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...