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 first chapter goes well beyond outlining the provision of characters or proper wages for different classes of servants, venturing advice on the art of conversation and social etiquette. IB
quotes Samuel Johnson
on men's...
Textual Features
Jane Warton
In this last publication JW
was concerned to disabuse the public of the idea that her younger brother had enjoyed drinking and smoking with low persons in alehouses (it was the allegation of low company...
Textual Features
Frances Burney
This novel adopts the point of view of an omniscient, often moralising, narrator. Its language has been often criticised as Johnson
ian. It has in fact little in common with Johnson's style, though it betrays...
Textual Features
Alethea Lewis
She heads her novel with a prefatory letter to the Rev. William Johnstone
, who, she says, has asked why she chooses to write fiction and not moral essays. She answers that novels offer opportunities...
Textual Features
Susanna Watts
SW
takes steps to prevent the cause of slavery entirely dominating her work, which, she announces, it will be devoted to the cause of suffering animals as well as to that of suffering men.
Watts, Susanna. The Humming Bird. I. Cockshaw.
34
Textual Features
Adelaide O'Keeffe
The list of correspondents is indeed potentially helpful, since the cast of characters is complicated. Six people exchange letters about the education of a boy and a girl, Dudley Clonmore and Claudy Howard, on the...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Strutt
The book had coloured illustrations. ES
adopts here a relaxed, informal tone. She pays more attention than formerly to scenery (though she insists that only truly personal responses are interesting), but also to the humdrum...
Textual Features
Janet Little
She consistently takes a challenging stance in face of authority. Ironically (in view of Johnson's championing of women writers and Burns's snobbish attitude about herself) she uses Samuel Johnson
as a symbol of the tyrant-critic...
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
Mary Scott
MS
brings her list up to date with significant women writers who have published since the appearance of The Feminead. Her information is not perfect—she credits Anna Williams
with some works actually written by...
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...
Textual Features
Mary Masters
MM
's poems here include those from the Gentleman's Magazine, sweepingly revised. There is, however, contrary to rumour, no specific internal or external evidence to suggest that Johnson
had any hand in the revision...
Textual Features
Sarah Scott
The Introductory History of Sweden, from The Middle of the Twelfth Century is in effect an essay on biography and historiography. It argues the importance of biography, and the influence which even minor figures exercise...
Residence
Ruth Fainlight
The house, reached by a steep cart-track with hairpin bends, stood in an olive grove with a grapevine over the door. RF
went back to England the following autumn, and was still there when Sillitoe...
Residence
Anna Williams
After a few more years in unidentified lodgings, presumably with her father, AW
was invited to share the spacious house which Samuel Johnson
had just taken for work on his Dictionary, in Gough Square...
