Book description
Dr Johnson's friendships with the leading women writers of the day was
an important feature of his life and theirs. He was willing to treat
women as intellectual equals and to promote their careers: something
ignored by his main biographer, James Boswell. Dr Johnson's Women
investigates the lives and writings of six leading female authors
Johnson knew well: Elizabeth Carter, Charlotte Lennox, Elizabeth
Montagu, Hester Thrale, Hannah More and Fanny Burney. It explores their
relationships with Johnson, with each other and with the world of
letters. It shows what it was like to be a woman writer in the 'Age of
Johnson'. It is often assumed that women writers in the eighteenth
century suffered the same restrictions and obstacles that confronted
their Victorian successors. Norma Clarke shows that this was by no means
the case. Highlighting the opportunities available to women of talent in
the eighteenth century, Dr Johnson's Women makes clear just how
impressive and varied their achievements were. Norma Clarke is Senior
Lecturer in English Literature at Kingston University. She is the author
of Ambitious Heights: Writing, Friendship, Love. The Jewsbury Sisters,
Felicia Hemans and Jane Carlyle, The Rise and Fall of the Woman of
Letters (published by Pimlico), many essays on eighteenth and
nineteenth-century writers and five novels for children.
