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 diary (in the possession of ES
's Coghill relations) is a wonderfully vivid and engaging text, from youth to old age. It delights in anecdote and comicality, but touches the heart with its stark...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Wollstonecraft
They included The first book of a series of lessons for children (written for MW
's elder daughter, Fanny Imlay
); a series of personal letters addressed to Imlay
(passionately expressive, ruggedly self-analytical), and to...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck
MAS
adds a new aesthetic category, the contemplative sublime, alongside the Burke
an or terrible sublime and other categories related to the Burkean beautiful. She derives her thinking from women as well as men. In...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Ann Kelty
She goes on to quote Johnson
, Cowper
, Emerson
(with whose thought she engages in some detail), and many other canonical names. Among women she quotes from Mary Bosanquet Fletcher
(a passage about communion...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Steele
Surviving prose by AS
includes miscellaneous as well as predominantly religious pieces. The Journey of Life, reminiscent of John Bunyan
's The Pilgrim's Progress or Samuel Johnson
's Vision of Theodore, opens with...
Intertextuality and Influence
Joan Aiken
This book is a prequel to some of its predecessors. Brazil in South America (here called New Cumbria in Roman America) is another transformation of actuality, ruled over by the sinister Queen Ginevra. Dido arrives...
Intertextuality and Influence
A. Woodfin
She learns to condemn her parents' treatment of her when she boards in a family who deliberately favour the ugly, deformed one of their young twins, to redress the balance. She feels a great relief...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Anne Barker
MAB
's discussion of schools leads her into an account of a visit made by the Norwegian missionary, Bishop Schreuder
, to a later Zulu chief, Cetshwayo
, taken from a blue-book or government report...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Deverell
MD
has an acute sense of the way women are disadvantaged. She is, she confesses, a rebel against the domestic sphere.
Deverell, Mary. Miscellanies in Prose and Verse. Printed for the author by J. Rivington, Jun.
1: 43
Of all the faults, that were ever laid to the charge of...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Inchbald
EI
did not choose the plays herself. Shakespeare fills the first five volumes, apart from one piece by Ben Jonson
, and five of her own plays fill volume 20. The eighteenth century is better...
Intertextuality and Influence
Hannah More
The title-page quotation from Paradise Lost features the archangel Raphael's pronouncement that it is better for human beings to know That which before us lies in daily life than things remote.
Feminist Companion Archive.
According to critic...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Grant
Charlotte Lennox
is alluded to in this book (though AG
gives her birth name wrongly as Massey),
Grant, Anne. Memoirs of an American Lady. Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme.
1: 21n
along with the more highly-ranked Milton
and Johnson
(whose Life of Savage she echoes, without naming...
Intertextuality and Influence
Beatrix Potter
Of the first three stories, Carrier's Bob tells how a waggoner's terrier, Bob, is neglected and ill-treated by the widow after his master's death; The Mole Catcher's Burying describes how, as a village mole-catcher lies...
Intertextuality and Influence
Frances Jacson
Chapters are headed with a lavish array of quotations. Among the better-known authors are Ariosto
(in the original), Shakespeare
, Drayton
, Milton
, Pope
(on the title-page), Young
, Gray
, Collins
, Johnson
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Fielding
This novel had some influence on Samuel Johnson
, both on his Rambler essays and on Rasselas: a matter which deserves critical attention. In fiction it ushers in a brilliant mid-century constellation and, together...