Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Anna Letitia Barbauld
-
Standard Name: Barbauld, Anna Letitia
Birth Name: Anna Letitia Aikin
Nickname: Nancy
Married Name: Anna Letitia Barbauld
Pseudonym: A Dissenter
Pseudonym: A Volunteer
Pseudonym: Bob Short
Used Form: Mrs Barbauld
Used Form: Anna Laetitia Barbauld
ALB
, writing and publishing in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, was a true woman of letters, an important poet, revered as mouthpiece or laureate for Rational Dissent. Her ground-breaking work on literary, political, social, and other intellectual topics balances her still better-known pedagogical works and writings for the very young. During her lifetime an extraordinary revolution in public opinion made her vilified as markedly as she had been revered.
JWC
became a lawyer, (moving from Ireland to London after the Act of Union) a Tory
MP, an editor of several eighteenth-century texts (including letters by Lady Hervey
and by Henrietta Howard, Lady Suffolk
)...
Literary responses
Maria Edgeworth
J. W. Croker
in the Quarterly Review faulted the collection for failing to provide a religious basis for its moral judgements. Anna Letitia Barbauld
responded with a letter to the Gentleman's Magazine, venting...
Textual Production
Maria Edgeworth
In July 1804 ME
proposed to Anna Letitia Barbauld
a scheme for a periodical to be written both for and by women. The timing, however, was unfortunate, and Barbauld declined.
Manly, Susan. “Maria Edgeworth (1768-1846)”. The Female Spectator (1995-), Vol.
10
, No. 2, pp. 1-3.
3
McCarthy, William. “Why Anna Letitia Barbauld Refused to Head a Women’s College: New Facts, New Story”. Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Vol.
23
, No. 3, pp. 349-79.
351-2
Textual Production
Maria Edgeworth
The Longman
's project reported by Catherine Hutton
on 13 June this year, for a women's periodical bearing the names of ME
, BarbauldInchbald
, and Hamilton
, seems not to have materialised. It...
Textual Production
Maria Edgeworth
ME
revised Belinda for inclusion in A. L. Barbauld
's series of The British Novelists.
Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Clarendon.
494-5
Friends, Associates
Maria Edgeworth
In London on this visit ME
found comparatively little to interest her. She did, however, visit her publisher Joseph Johnson
, whose support for radical writings had put him in the King's Bench Prison...
Textual Production
Maria Edgeworth
ME
's early letters to her friend Fanny Robinson
are earnest and priggish. By the 1790s she was sending the Ruxtons letters which have literary merit in themselves (mixing amusing anecdote and expressions of affection)...
Literary responses
Maria Edgeworth
In January 1797 the Critical Review recorded the widespread opinion that the author of Literary Ladies was John Aikin
(brother of Anna Laetitia Barbauld
, and a prolific and respected writer on pedagogical and social...
Literary responses
Maria Edgeworth
The reviewer in the Critical read it only on account of Castle Rackrent, and was disappointed.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall.
3d ser. 4 (1805): 218
Anna Letitia Barbauld
gently reproved Edgeworth for betraying her own sex to its...
She died in debt. A substantial collection of books, sold after her death in an auction held to raise money to satisfy her creditors, included works by Sir Walter Scott
, Anna Letitia Barbauld
,...
Textual Features
Eliza Fenwick
The children in the story, whose characters have been spoiled by upbringing in the West Indies, are at first unwilling to visit the bookshop, but they find it a delightful, pretty, and fashionable...
Textual Features
Eliza Fenwick
For this anthology EF
gathered mostly improving pedagogical material, drawing on revered literary names like Shakespeare
and Milton
, as well as more recent and controversial writers like Thomas Chatterton
and Helen Maria Williams
...
Textual Production
Eliza Fenwick
Another of EF
's children's books, Lessons for Children, first appeared in 1809 and went through a number of editions as well as a French translation published by M. J. Godwin
in 1820.
