Elizabeth Johnson (died 1752)

[4] Elizabeth and Henry Porter became friends of Johnson in 1732 (on first meeting him, she said to her daughter Lucy, "That is the most sensible man I ever met.")

According to the Latin inscription Johnson composed for her gravestone, she was beautiful, accomplished, ingenious, and pious ('formosae, cultae, ingeniosae, piae').

Johnson called the marriage "a love-match on both sides," and always recalled her affectionately and with grief, especially on the anniversary of her death.

The chief descriptions of her, however, come from unsympathetic accounts by Johnson's contemporaries and biographers such as his ex-pupil David Garrick, Hester Thrale and Thomas B. Macaulay: the last described her as "a short, fat, coarse woman, painted half an inch thick, dressed in gaudy colours, and fond of exhibiting provincial airs and graces."

The nineteenth- and twentieth-century writer and essayist Alice Meynell judged her less harshly, attacking these critics for prejudice.