Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Christian Isobel Johnstone
-
Standard Name: Johnstone, Christian Isobel
Birth Name: Christian Isobel Tod
Used Form: Christian Isobel Todd
Married Name: Christian Isobel McLeish
Married Name: Christian Isobel McLiesh
Married Name: Christian Isobel Johnstone
Pseudonym: The Author of Clan-Albin
Pseudonym: Aunt Jane
Pseudonym: Margaret Dods
CIJ
is remarkable both for her pioneering of the Scottish national tale (in the early nineteenth century, neck and neck with Sir Walter Scott
) and for her long-continuing career in journalism, as contributor and editor (the latter role unprecedented for one of her sex). Her non-fiction for adults ranged from cookery to the politics of resistance. She also wrote children's books both fictional and non-fictional.
LEL's poetry was included in Christian Isobel Johnstone
's 1842 Rational Reading Lessons for children, and in 1879 in Louisa Anne Meredith
's Our Island Home, A Tasmanian Sketch Book, alongside other work by...
Anthologization
Mary Russell Mitford
Though Our Village was rejected at first by the New Monthly Magazine, MRM
went on publishing in that and in the London Magazine (for which she sometimes wrote in dramatic or dialogue form), the...
Anthologization
Catherine Gore
Many of CG
's novels were reprinted in popular series of the day: the Railway Library, the Parlour Library, Bentley's Standard Novels, Baudry's European Library, and A Collection of British Authors...
Friends, Associates
Mary Howitt
In Nottingham MH
met L. E. L.
and perhaps Elizabeth Fry
. She was visited by Mary
and Dora Wordsworth
(wife and daughter of the poet), and later she and her husband stayed with the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Isabella Spence
Spence's title-page bears a quotation from James Cririe
, a little-known Scots poet whom Burns had praised (and whom she cites several times later in her text). Perhaps for the sake of her original audience...
Literary responses
Harriet Martineau
The Illustrations catapulted HM
into fame: she was lionized by London society. She received flattering responses from Coleridge
and from her precursor as a political economist, Jane Marcet
.
Chapman, Maria Weston, and Harriet Martineau. “Memorials of Harriet Martineau”. Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography, James R. Osgood, pp. 2: 131 - 596.
212, 214
Christian Isobel Johnstone
in...
Literary responses
Harriet Martineau
The overall reception of this novel was better than that of Deerbrook, although the nobility of the hero was felt to be exaggerated.
Roberts, Caroline. The Woman and the Hour: Harriet Martineau and Victorian Ideologies. University of Toronto Press.
76-7
The Athenæum was downright hostile to the book's subject: Do...
Literary responses
Marion Reid
Christian Johnstone
, reviewing Reid's work for Tait's Edinburgh Review, thoroughly approved it. The author, she said, had successfully settled the great boundary question of woman's sphere. The sphere, in its most circumscribed...
Literary responses
L. E. L.
Reviews were positive. In the fifteen-page review in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, provided by Christian Isobel Johnstone
, the writer confessed to being enthralled by the fascinating work and labelled the novel a pure specimen...
Literary Setting
Jane Harvey
Again her title-page quotes Shakespeare
. The novel opens with a musical party in the housekeeper's room at Cassilwood House in Northumberland on the fifth of November at the time of the second Jacobite Rebellion...
Occupation
Isa Craig
The Scotsman, founded in 1817, was already a well-established newspaper. IC
worked under the editorship of Alexander Russel
, who held this position from 1845 to 1876, and who had got his start in...
Publishing
Amelia Opie
AO
contributed the first part of Recollections of Days in Belgium to Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, of which Christian Isobel Johnstone
was editor.
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 116. Gale Research.
229
Opie, Amelia. “Introduction”. Adeline Mowbray, edited by Shelley King and John B. Pierce, Oxford University Press, p. i - xxix.
xxxix
Reception
Anna Brownell Jameson
Reviewers noted the fact that it was a woman who had set out on this bold journey. Christian Isobel Johnstone
's review in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine was fairly typical in suggesting that that Winter Studies...
Reception
L. E. L.
The merits of annuals in general were debated, and with some their contents became a byword for poor literary quality. Thus although Christian Isobel Johnstone
considered LEL's Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book for 1836 to...
Textual Features
Adelaide O'Keeffe
AOK
's unusual historical novel, which appeared several years before anything comparable by Sydney Morgan
, Christian Isobel Johnstone
, or Sir Walter Scott
, seems to carry within itself the seeds of the national...
Timeline
9 June 1819: The library of the late Queen Charlotte was...