Samuel Johnson and Elizabeth Carter: Pudding, Epictetus, and the Accomplished Woman

Abstract

The Bluestockings, among whom Johnson counted some of his most honored friends, have aroused recent scholarly interest.' Women such as Elizabeth Carter, Hester Thrale Piozzi, and Hannah More deserve this renewed attention for their achievements as well as for their conspicuous roles in the intellectual life of Johnson's London. Prominent and influential in their day, these women were for a time neglected by scholars who found them too conservative for the model of dawning anti-patriarchal consciousness posited in such works as The Madwoman in the Attic (1979).2 Scholars intent on finding eighteenth-century prototypes of what emerged in the next century as a feminist protest against the male-dominated literary tradition were left with Mary Wollstonecraft as almost the lone exemplar of radical dissent. Other women, admired by contemporaries for their creative or intellectual achievements, seemed too content with women's status in society, too accepting of their era's conservative values, to merit late twentieth-century attention.3 Yet women such as Carter achieved prominence against great odds, were quite conscious of themselves as examples of female achievement, and energetically promoted other women's accomplishments.4 The eighteenth century, contrary to what might be assumed after a cursory study of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (1985),5 was rich in female participants in the world of letters. Their contributions, ranging from poems, plays, periodicals, and classical translations, to the more distinctively feminine genres of letters, novels, and educational tracts, are finally being recognized.6 Elizabeth Carter, especially, deserves attention as an eighteenth-century woman whose energy, ambition, and keen sense of irony were as important as her piety to her career. In fact, Carter's posthumously published correspondence unwittingly dramatizes contemporary women's struggle to reconcile domestic and intellectual activities. Her letters, replete with critical analyses and domestic anecdotes, yield insight into Carter's intellectual life and culturally imposed limitations. Citing these letters as well as biograph-