Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Anna Letitia Barbauld
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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.
For most of her childhood, AS
was educated at home by her mother, as the Sewell family could not afford formal training for either of the children. Mary Sewell
believed strongly in the Edgeworth
s'...
Occupation
Lucy Toulmin Smith
Manchester College (now Harris Manchester College
) had a long and distinguished history as a Dissenting institution (including spells at York and London) before it moved to Oxford in 1889 and into new buildings...
AT
makes it clear she is no proto-feminist: If women are thought to possess minds less capable of solid reflection than men, they owe this conjecture entirely to their own vanity, and erroneous method of...
Textual Production
Sarah Trimmer
ST
's Little Spelling Book for Young Children (designed, she said, to teach the user enough to read Barbauld
's Lessons for Children) reached a second edition by August 1786. As a kind of...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Sarah Trimmer
This journal included essays on moral topics. It was important for taking children's literature seriously and publishing reviews of it. Critic Andrew O'Malley
notes that the reviews contain a compendium of her views on education...
Literary responses
Sarah Trimmer
ST
's work made a great impact. She was one of the twenty-four most-reviewed women writers of 1789-90.
Hawkins, Ann R., and Stephanie Eckroth, editors. Romantic Women Writers Reviewed. Vol. 3 vols., Ashgate Publishing Company.
ST
's writing arose out of her work for two causes, religion and education, brought most closely together in her interest in Sunday schools. She edited magazines and was a pioneer both in animal stories...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Trimmer
Taking Barbauld
as her acknowledged model, ST
sets out to inculcate knowledge of and reverence for God's creation, by means of a heavily instructive maternal monologue, continued from one day to another without space for...
Textual Features
Susanna Watts
Ephemera of all kinds have been bound in: family anecdotes, a letter of William Cowper
of 1788, a Hindu Primer (or alphabet), a railway ticket of 1839, women's parliamentary petitions against slavery of 1833 (one...
Here she expounds her method of teaching her grandchildren [or step-grandchildren] through play, and features acute critical comment on female writers for children. In particular, she makes detailed, intelligent criticism of Maria Edgeworth
's children's...
Friends, Associates
Mary Wollstonecraft
Newington Green was a fortunate place for MW
to have settled: it was a centre of intellectual Dissent. There she met the radical minister Richard Price
, the poet Samuel Rogers
, and the teacher...
