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.
Knowledge of AA
's writing spread rapidly. The reactionary Stephen Gardiner
, Bishop of Winchester, complained on 6 June 1547 of the number of copies in circulation.
Beilin, Elaine V., and Anne Askew. “Introduction”. The Examinations of Anne Askew, Oxford University Press, 1996.
Clifford, James L. Hester Lynch Piozzi (Mrs Thrale). Clarendon Press, 1987.
61
Literary responses
Elizabeth Montagu
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 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.
qtd. in
Sheridan, Frances. “Introduction”. Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, edited by Jean Coates Cleary et al., World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, 1995.
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.
qtd. in
Kennedy, Deborah. Helen Maria Williams and the Age of Revolution. Bucknell University Press, 2002.
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
Mary Sewell
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 responses
Hester Lynch Piozzi
HLP
was one of the twenty-four most-reviewed women writers of 1789-90.
Hawkins, Ann R., and Stephanie Eckroth, editors. Romantic Women Writers Reviewed. Vol. 3 vols., Ashgate Publishing Company, 2011–2013, 3 vols.
Samuel Johnson
, in his review of Elizabeth Harrison
's Miscellanies on Moral and Religious Subjects, in Prose and Verse, written for the Literary Magazine, or Universal Review in October 1756, went out of...
Literary responses
May Drummond
Thomas Story
said that at the beginning of her preaching career MD
had a Turn of Expression . . . very taking to most Hearers, especially the more polite sort of both Sexes,
Story, Thomas. The Life of Thomas Story. Isaac Thompson, 1747.
720
and...
Literary responses
Martha Fowke
Already by this date MF
's reputation as a writer had become submerged . . . by scandal and innuendo.
Gerrard, Christine. Aaron Hill: The Muses’ Projector 1685-1750. Oxford University Press, 2003.
71
The same dismissive view of her was later promulgated by Samuel Johnson
. Recent...
Literary responses
Charlotte Lennox
Samuel Johnson
pronounced in conversation that CL
was worthy to rank with the exceptional women Carter
, More
, and Burney
: more yet, she was superiour to them all.
Boswell, James, 1740 - 1795. Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Editors Hill, George Birkbeck and Laurence Fitzroy Powell, Clarendon, 1934, 6 vols.
4: 275
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
Ann Yearsley
More
and Elizabeth Montagu
admired AY
as a primitive, untrained writer whose excellence came from nature, not from carefully nurtured ability: as a phenomenon verging on a freak. More's Prefatory Letter to Yearsley's Poems, on...
