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 patriotism of EM
's riposte ensured its enthusiastic reception. Readers (among them a brother of Elizabeth Carter
, who refrained from enlightening him) assumed that the anonymity of this authoritative critical voice concealed a...
Literary responses
Frances Burney
Evelina was an instantaneous success. While FB
's identity was still unknown she repeatedly listened to praise of herself, uttered in ignorance that she had any concern in it. Samuel Johnson
(like friends of Swift
Literary responses
Isabella Neil Harwood
The reviews for this second novel were far more mixed than for INH
's first. The Pall Mall Gazette found the plot entertaining enough but the characters flat and stiff, with no real depth...
Literary responses
Hester Lynch Piozzi
Johnson
warmly admired it.
Clifford, James L. Hester Lynch Piozzi (Mrs Thrale). Clarendon Press.
61
Literary responses
Anna Seward
Mary (Young) Sewell
praised the author in a poem beginning O Thou! whoe'er thou art—Oh Bard divine! Since she did not know AS
's identity, she may have written her poem in the months before...
Literary responses
Anna Letitia Barbauld
Excellent reviews included William Woodfall
decisively classifying the sister as of a higher genius than the brother.
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
113
Johnson
(a frequent target of parodists) thought ALB
's the best imitation of him that he had...
Literary responses
Helen Maria Williams
The New Annual Register praised the poem's thoughts, imagery, and versification, and remarked that the concluding description of the rise of art and science rises to no small degree of sublimity.
Kennedy, Deborah. Helen Maria Williams and the Age of Revolution. Bucknell University Press.
28
Samuel Johnson
...
Literary responses
Helen Maria Williams
These volumes moved James Boswell
, in a revised edition of his life of Johnson, to withdraw his earlier description of HMW
as amiable and to assert that Johnson
would have found her current attitudes...
Literary responses
Anna Letitia Barbauld
The Critical Review gave high praise to each of the series. So did the Monthly, which also cracked her anonymity from the beginning.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall.
46 (1778): 160; 47 (1779): 320
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
191-2
Vulnerable as a Dissenter,...
Literary responses
Frances Sheridan
The novel in its first form was hugely successful: it brought FS
instant fame. Johnson
teasingly expressed doubts about her moral right to make your readers suffer so much.
Sheridan, Frances. “Introduction”. Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, edited by Jean Coates Cleary et al., World’s Classics, Oxford University Press.
Sarah Stickney Ellis
remarked (rather censoriously and in a remarkable echo of fictional employers imagined by Samuel Johnson
and by the servant-poet Elizabeth Hands
): I don't know that I should have liked it, if...
Literary Setting
Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins
This odd and intriguing novel is positively eccentric: in the naming of its characters (Mr Bevirode, Mrs Kilgrim), in its exotically melodramatic plot line, and in the way it juxtaposes satire with romance and moralising...
Material Conditions of Writing
Hester Lynch Piozzi
Hester Thrale
composed what is today her best-known letter: a measured, dignified rebuke to Johnson
in reply to his epistolary bellow of pain and rage at the news of her impending second marriage.
Johnson, Samuel, and Hester Lynch Piozzi. The Letters of Samuel Johnson. Editor Chapman, Robert William, Clarendon Press.
3: 175
Material Conditions of Writing
Hester Lynch Piozzi
From ItalyHLP
arranged the publication of her Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson.
Clifford, James L. Hester Lynch Piozzi (Mrs Thrale). Clarendon Press.
263
names
Mary Jones
The last was Samuel Johnson
's nickname for her. He loved nicknames, and this had reference to three things: her brother's position as Chanter, her practice of poetry, and Milton
's address to the nightingale...
