According to Queeney (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Beryl Bainbridge
- First Published: 2001
- Type of Work: Novel
- Time of Work: 1764-1811
- Setting: London and Southwark, England; France
- Principal Characters: Samuel Johnson, Hester Thrale, Queeney
- Genres: Long fiction, Historical fiction
- Subjects: Girls, Memory, Mothers, France or French people, Authors or writers, Nineteenth century, Literature, Friendship, Poetry or poets, England or English people, Eighteenth century, London, Depression, mental
- Locales: France, London, England
When Samuel Johnson died in 1784, the race was on to publish biographies of the poet, biographer, critic, and lexicographer whose personality and prose helped to set the literary style of his age. Johnson had attained a towering reputation with his monumental Dictionary of the English Language (2 vols., 1755), his edition of Shakespeare (8 vols., 1765), and most of all his multivolume Lives of the Poets (10 vols., 1779-1781), which propounded his theory of biography: “To judge right of an author we must transport ourselves to his time, and examine what were the wants of...
[The entire page is 1788 words long]
