Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Lucy Aikin
-
Standard Name: Aikin, Lucy
Birth Name: Lucy Aikin
Pseudonym: L. A.
Pseudonym: Mary Godolphin
Pseudonym: L. A.
LA
's famous relations made her modest about her creative writing. Publishing during the early nineteenth century, she has to her credit a major poem expressing revisionist historical and feminist ideas, and an interesting novel, as well as much biographical and historical scholarship and some writing for children. She was a pioneer in the writing of cultural history concerned with social environment as well as events. A number of her letters were published after her death.
Lucy Aikin
gave her birthplace as Wells (a larger place, not far away).
The Monthly Repository. Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme.
1 n.s., 1827.126
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Aikin, Lucy, and Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger. “Memoir of Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger”. Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn, 3rdrd ed, Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green.
Residence
Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
EOB
had persuaded her mother to settle the pair of them in London.
This is the date given by Lucy Aikin
in her obituary of Benger, though elsewhere she places the move a year...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
Having already praised many contemporary women writers in print, EOB
was now able to meet them. The move to London was accomplished principally through the zealous friendship of Miss Sarah Wesley
, who had already...
Wealth and Poverty
Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
Lucy Aikin
gave it as her opinion in print that EOB
's precarious financial situation made it fortunate for her that she had not lived longer: old age would have found her unprovided.
The Monthly Repository. Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme.
1 n.s., 1827.127
death
Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
Lucy Aikin
wrote an obituary of her for the first number of the Monthly Repository,
The Monthly Repository. Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme.
1 n.s., 1827.126-7
which was picked up for reprinting in the USA in the Museum of Foreign Literature and...
Material Conditions of Writing
Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
She wrote it before the death of Catharine Macaulay
, though it appeared afterwards. Lucy Aikin
said she wrote it at about fifteen, which exaggerates her youth by only a year.
The Monthly Repository. Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme.
1 n.s., 1827.126
Her...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
The notice in the Analytical Review, which may have been written by Wollstonecraft
, is curiously unenthusiastic.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Editors Todd, Janet and Marilyn Butler, Pickering.
7: 416-17
At the time of EOB
's death, Lucy Aikin
called The Female Geniada poem...
Publishing
Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
Joanna Baillie
chose two of EOB
's poems for inclusion in her Collection of Poems, published in early 1823.
Baillie, Joanna, editor. A Collection of Poems, Chiefly Manuscript, and from Living Authors. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown.
Lucy Aikin
's memoir of Benger (as published in one of its subject's works after...
Publishing
Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
Benger was drawn to write of Anne Boleyn not by the personal scandals surrounding her but by her importance to the history of religion. Like her later books about royal personages, this one celebrates the...
Textual Production
Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
Lucy Aikin
said that at the time of her death EOB
was planning to write a comparable volume of memoirs of the time of Henri IV of France
(the former champion of Protestants who converted...
Textual Production
Anna Letitia Barbauld
ALB
's niece
wrote of her (with an echo of Pope
on himself) that while yet a child, she was surprised to find herself a poet.
McCarthy, William et al. “Introduction”. The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, University of Georgia Press, p. xxi - xlvi.
In summer 1789 she wrote a poem of complex feeling, An Epistle to Dr Enfield, which she said he was to throw into the Mersey on a farewell visit to Warrington. It too...
Literary responses
Anna Letitia Barbauld
J. W. Croker
's notice in the Quarterly Review (in June 1812, wrongly attributed by some to Southey
) was most offensive of all. He reached for the gendered weapons so often drawn against Mary Wollstonecraft
Literary responses
Anna Letitia Barbauld
Reviews were mixed, some praising her for accuracy and good judgement as a biographer, some doubting the value of the letters, and some employing a vocabulary of delicacy and related terms which was becoming de...
Textual Features
Anna Letitia Barbauld
ALB
draws on Hannah More
, her niece Lucy Aikin
, and (anonymously) Joanna Baillie
. She is even-handed in that she includes six excerpts from James Fordyce
's Sermons to Young Women, a...
