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.
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...
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
Frances Reynolds
With this rejection of the straight line, or of the phallic, she turns to feminine sensibility on which to ground her principles of taste or of aesthetics. The remarkable result must be called a proto-feminist...
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
Elizabeth Sarah Gooch
It is not clear how much of Bellamy's completed novel ESG
actually wrote: as much as the whole of volume three may be hers. Her preface echoes Samuel Johnson
when it says the history of...
Intertextuality and Influence
Emma Parker
EP
says she has studied to avoid a dictatorial tone . . . considering herself rather as one of those [women] she is addressing.
Parker, Emma. Important Trifles. T. Egerton.
prelims
Feminist Companion Archive.
She writes as a strong-minded Christian, and makes use of...
Intertextuality and Influence
Barbara Hofland
The title-page quotes Johnson
's Rambler. This novel opens with fashionable and effective abruptness: What can I do? These words, spoken in a low tone, and followed by a heart rending sigh, broke on...
Intertextuality and Influence
Eliza Kirkham Mathews
The novel which emerged from so much interference during composition is naive, exaggerated, and badly structured, but highly unusual, with great intensity in its writing. Its title-page quotes Thomas Holcroft
, and its epigraphs to...
Intertextuality and Influence
Hannah More
HM
's prologue (invoking Samuel Johnson
as authority) presents domestic subject-matter as more relevant than the fate of empires.
Intertextuality and Influence
Rosa Nouchette Carey
One of the many novels which RNC
chose to dignify by quotations to head her chapters, this seems to make a particular attempt to impress. Those quoted imply considerable learning, even if (as seems likely)...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Meeke
Harcourt's title-page quotes Samuel Johnson
. Its story opens in Switzerland, where the sixty-something merchant Mr Elton, travelling for the sake of his health, is saved from falling by a young man who...
Intertextuality and Influence
Emma Robinson
In print ER
's play was accompanied by a preface written in the voice of a young-Turk satirist. It is a piece that could hardly have appeared at this date under a woman's name, and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Catherine Fanshawe
The poems by CF
include an Elegy on the Abrogation of the Birthnight Ball (her lament, in the person of an elderly beau, for the passing of the old-fashioned minuet: an orgy of grandiose parody...
Intertextuality and Influence
Charlotte Smith
A preface (in the first volume) quotes the words of Samuel Johnson
(with apology for applying them to so trifling a matter as novel-writing) about working at his dictionary amid grief and illness, feeling cut...