Freya Johnston

Freya Johnston is a professor of English at Oxford and a fellow of St Anne’s. She has written books about Samuel Johnson and Jane Austen and is the general editor of the Cambridge edition of the novels of Thomas Love Peacock.

Among the Rouge-Pots: ‘Yellow Book’ Lives

Freya Johnston, 16 November 2023

Thefirst 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...

Dorothy​ is a badly paid, unenthusiastic adjunct professor of English at an unnamed New York City university. Trained to criticise and evaluate, she pays meticulous attention to herself and her surroundings – to no particular end. The Life of the Mind, Christine Smallwood’s first novel, begins with Dorothy having a miscarriage, and charts her mental and physical state over the...

Mary Wollstonecraft​ is in many ways ill-suited to the role of the earliest advocate of women’s rights. The term ‘feminism’ and its tradition postdate her by at least half a century; she appears to have intensely disliked most women; and she celebrated qualities of mind that she tended to label ‘masculine’ or ‘manly’. In the works for which she is...

‘How much are the Poor to be pitied, & the Rich to be blamed!’ the young Jane Austen exclaimed in a marginal note to Oliver Goldsmith’s History of England. Mary Toft, the notorious 18th-century ‘rabbit breeder’, was undoubtedly very poor. But was she to be pitied? Contemporary accounts of her hoax identified her as ‘poor’ in ways that combined...

Beastliness: Eric Griffiths

John Mullan, 23 May 2019

Quite​ a few academics in British universities are still called ‘lecturers’ even if plenty of humanities students seem to think lecturing is unnecessary. They can see the point of...

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Bring some Madeira: Thomas Love Peacock

Thomas Keymer, 8 February 2018

Marilyn Butler​, whose Peacock Displayed was published in 1979, wasn’t the first to connect Peacock’s name with the showy wit of his satires. It started with Shelley, his friend...

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