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.
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.
qtd. in
“The Times Digital Archive 1785-2007”. Thompson Gale: The Times Digital Archive.
(5 March 1924): 12
While thoroughly...
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
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
Elizabeth Jolley
EJ
invoked as an appropriate description of her own motivation, Flaubert
's dictum that writing comes from an inner wound.
Joussen, Ulla. “An Interview with Elizabeth Jolley”. Kunapipi, Vol.
15
, No. 2, 1993, pp. 37-43.
40
She said of Johnson
's Rasselas and Goethe
's Elective Affinities (both of which...
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
Sophia Lee
The plot in some ways echoes that of Richardson
's Pamela. Cecilia Rivers, orphan daughter of a poor and saintly clergyman, comes down in the world and has to earn her living as a...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Loudon
In prose the opening tale, Julia de Clifford, presents a well-meaning but thoughtless and impulsive heroine who progresses from dressing up as a ghost to scare the servants, to plunging her lover into despair...
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
Eliza Kirkham Mathews
The novel which emerged from so much interference during composition is naive, exaggerated, and badly structured, but highly unusual, with great intensity in its writing. Its title-page quotes Thomas Holcroft
, and its epigraphs to...
Intertextuality and Influence
Hannah More
HM
's prologue (invoking Samuel Johnson
as authority) presents domestic subject-matter as more relevant than the fate of empires.
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.
24ff
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Sarah Gooch
In this first publication ESG
stands on her dignity. She opens with a Johnson
ian aphorism (Some alleviation of our distresses is always derived from communication)
Gooch, Elizabeth Sarah. An Appeal to the Public. G. Kearsley, 1788.
prelims
and closes on a note of...
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
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...