Freya Johnston

‘No period has writers who play more difficult games with fact and factuality than the Augustan,’ Barbara Everett wrote in 1985. ‘This helps to make Pope the most interesting and problematic of subjects for biography.’ It also helps to make him an interesting and problematic choice for editors, since any Collected Works involves a narrative of authorial progression and...

The main business​ of almost all Jane Austen’s fiction is to portray that brief period in a young woman’s life when she is at the height of her charms and about to surrender them for ever to a more or less deserving suitor. During this period, she will encounter many examples of successful and unsuccessful marriage, but these are necessarily incidental to her concerns. Once the...

Criticism,​ for Samuel Johnson, was female, her votaries for the most part malicious, ineffectual men. In an early issue of the Rambler from 1750, Criticism is presented as ‘the eldest daughter of Labour and of Truth’, charged by the Muses with distinguishing good from bad writing and duty-bound to confer immortality or oblivion. Eventually, worn out, she gives up trying to...

The​ first issue of the British periodical the Yellow Book appeared in April 1894, and began by announcing the death of the author. Its lead item was a short story by Henry James in which a celebrated writer, Neil Paraday, is pursued by a crew of souvenir hunters and salon-frequenting harpies. ‘The Death of the Lion’ is narrated in the first person by Paraday’s nameless,...

There​ is no entry for Michael Field in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The search function directs you first to ‘Bradley, Katharine Harris’ and then to ‘Cooper, Edith Emma’. Click on the second name, however, and you aren’t taken to a biography of Cooper but back to her aunt, Bradley. These convoluted preliminaries seem appropriate for two women...