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.
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...
Residence
Theodora Benson
The family lived in the historic Stowe House at Lichfield, Staffordshire, built in the mid-eighteenth century by Elizabeth Aston
, a friend of Samuel Johnson
.
“Stowe House”. Institute of Leadership and Management (ILM).
Reception
Hannah Glasse
This book came to dominate its field. It was widely believed in the book-trade to be the work of a man. The publisher Edward Dilly
in 1778 informed a gathering which included Samuel Johnson
and...
Reception
Elizabeth Carter
As early as 1741 a portrait of EC
as intellectual icon, with a poem about it in the Gentleman's Magazine, celebrated and publicised her genius and exceptionality.
“Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings”. National Portrait Gallery.
She was one of the handful of...
Reception
Margaret Cavendish
These verse eulogies or testimonials came from distinguished persons and institutions to whom she had presented copies of her work. It circulated widely: the Dutch poet Constantijn Huygens
owned one of her books.
Smith, Emma. Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book. Oxford University Press.
92
During...
Reception
Janet Little
Little called herself a crazy scribbling lass,
Little, Janet. The Poetical Works of Janet Little, the Scotch Milkmaid. J. and P. Wilson.
171
Ferguson, Moira. Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: Nation, Class, and Gender. State University of New York Press.
103
but her tone is defiant rather than self-deprecating. In relishing the indignation which she supposed literary arbiters like Johnson
would feel about her writing, she is...
Reception
Amelia B. Edwards
John Cordy Jeaffreson
gave two full Athenæum columns to Half-a-Million of Money, but largely in order to complain that in spite of its unusual plot the novel was essentially derivative, and sapped his confidence...
Reception
Hester Mulso Chapone
HMC
was one of the handful of women cited by Johnson
(as Miss Mulso) as an authority in his Dictionary of the English Language, 1755 (all of them among the fifty or so...
Reception
Hannah More
Some lines from Sensibility were quoted as caption below a print of Johnson
; HM
saw this print on a wall at Pembroke College
when visiting Oxford with him in June 1782.
Jones, Mary Gwladys. Hannah More. Cambridge University Press.
46-7
Reception
Jane Barker
JB
was one of a handful of women quoted as an authority in Johnson
's Dictionary, 1755. Kathryn King notes how rapidly, in face of images of the female poet as gentle and genteel...
Reception
Charlotte Lennox
This first novel was reviewed in the Monthly Review as the best in the novel way that has been lately published:
Griffiths, Ralph, and George Edward Griffiths, editors. Monthly Review. R. Griffiths.
4 (1750-1): 160
praise which is immediately qualified by a list of the...
Reception
Susan Miles
Her publishers at Persephone
chart the progress of her reputation through an experience around the turn of the century related by Ian Hamilton
. A train of thought about forgotten names in Johnson
's Lives...
Reception
Anna Seward
Publication of a Beauties of was an accolade which put AS
on a par with, for instance, Johnson
or Richardson
.
Reception
Sarah Trimmer
ST
's work made a great impact. She was one of the twenty-four most-reviewed women writers of 1789-90.
Hawkins, Ann R., and Stephanie Eckroth, editors. Romantic Women Writers Reviewed. Vol. 3 vols., Ashgate Publishing Company.
The very young Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins came unexpectedly on the letter of rebuke to Johnson
while helping her father
with his biographical work: she
admired the letter enough to record her admiration years later, though she...
