Norma Clarke. Dr Johnson's Women m...

Norma Clarke. Dr Johnson's Women modern York: Hambledon and London, 2000 260 pp + index, bibliography, and illustrations. ISBN 1-85285-254-2 $2495

Dr Johnson's Women is aimed at a broad audience interested in the eighteenth-century British literary world, and especially in women writers of that period. Norma Clarke's preface clearly announces her intention and approach. She terms the work "an attempt at collective biography which is also, in part, collective criticism." Her stated goal is to explore "the conditions of female authorship at a particular time,