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.
Her idiosyncratic humour is well shown in The Toad's Journal. A moral passage at the end of this poem, in a different metre, draws a moral against idleness, or living in vain; but the...
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.
24ff
Intertextuality and Influence
Barbara Hofland
The title-page quotes from Spenser
, and the first chapter from Johnson
's Rambler. This sophisticated novel, with a North Yorkshire setting, a large cast of upper-class characters, and a wide range of reference...
Intertextuality and Influence
Susanna Haswell Rowson
The title-page quotes Samuel Johnson
asserting that an author has nothing but his own merits to stand or fall on. The Birth of Genius, an irregular ode, offers advice to my son to love...
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, 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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Sarah Gooch
ESG
quotes on her title-page from James Hammond
and early in her first volume from Samuel Johnson
(no book was ever spared out of tenderness to the author).
Gooch, Elizabeth Sarah. The Life of Mrs Gooch. Printed for the authoress and sold by C. and G. Kearsley.
1: 11
The quotation from...
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...
Instructor
David Garrick
He attended the tiny, unsuccessful school on which Samuel Johnson
lost his wife's money.
Acquainted with Hester Piozzi
(and an admirer of her wit),
Seward, Anna. Letters of Anna Seward. Editor Constable, Archibald, Vol.
6 vols.
, A. Constable.
2: 102
AS
was long but less warmly acquainted with Johnson
. She accused him both of malice (repeatedly) and of liking only worshippers...
Friends, Associates
Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins
Visitors to her parents' house included Oliver Goldsmith
and Samuel Johnson
, whom the Hawkins children nicknamed Polyphemus, after the one-eyed giant in the Odyssey.
Hawkins, Laetitia-Matilda. Memoirs, Anecdotes, Facts and Opinions. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, and C. and J. Rivington.
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography notes both that MD
received patronage from Bristol heiress Ann Lovell Gwatkin
, and that Hannah More
emphatically did not take to her, though their paths must repeatedly have...
Friends, Associates
Frances Brooke
Before departing for Québec to join her husband
, FB
attended a farewell party with Samuel Johnson
and other literary friends.
McMullen, Lorraine. An Odd Attempt in a Woman: The Literary Life of Frances Brooke. University of British Columbia Press.