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.
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...
Literary responses
Joanna Baillie
The Chief Justice of Ceylon, Sir Alexander Johnstone
, asked that two of JB
's last plays be translated into Singalese.One—The Bride, A Tragedy (published in summer 1828), had a Singalese subject.
Quarterly Review. J. Murray.
38 (1828): 602
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...
Literary responses
Lucy Toulmin Smith
As an anonymous writer for the Times rather oddly phrased it in an obituary, LTS
's services to English scholarship and literature were altogether out of proportion to her notoriety.
“Miss Lucy Toulmin Smith”. Times, No. 39774, p. 11.
39774 (1911):11
Although she is...
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...
Occupation
Elizabeth Strickland
ES
duly began writing for children and editing a periodical, but this was a temporary measure. They formed the intention of publishing historical memoirs or biographies. (Both biography collections and the memoir as a new...
Occupation
Anna Letitia Barbauld
At some time before November 1773, while the engaged pair were casting around for a means of earning money, Countess Spencer
(perhaps, but only perhaps, with the support of Elizabeth Montagu
, and quite possibly...
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...
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...
Textual Features
Sarah Trimmer
In addition to Catharine Cappe
's work on Sunday schools and versions of fairy stories by Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy
, the magazine reviewed work by a whole library of didactic, pedagogical, or improving writers, reprinted as...
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...
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.