Lucy Aikin

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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.
Title page of Lucy Aikin's "Epistles on Women, exemplifying their character and condition in various ages and nations. With miscellaneous poems", 1810, with the author's name and the colophon of the publisher, Joseph Johnson.

Milestones

6 November 1781
LA was born in Warrington, Lancashire.
William McCarthy, biographer of her famous aunt, suggests that she and her brother Edward may perhaps have been christened (with names not traditional in their family) after Ed Rivers, hero of Frances Brooke 's The History of Emily Montague, and his sister Lucy, an ideally loving and mutually supportive pair of siblings.
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
36
Feminist Companion Archive.
Gentleman’s Magazine. Various publishers.
134 (1864) 1: 396
April 1810
LA published her first work of major significance, her verse Epistles on Women, Exemplifying their Character and Condition in Various Ages and Nations.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall.
3d ser. 19 (1810): 447
29 January 1864
LA died of influenza at her home in Hampstead, Milford House.
Gentleman’s Magazine. Various publishers.
(1864) 1: 396
Le Breton, Philip Hemery, and Lucy Aikin. “Memoir”. Memoirs, Miscellanies and Letters, Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1864.
xxvii
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Biography

Birth and Influences

6 November 1781
LA was born in Warrington, Lancashire.
William McCarthy, biographer of her famous aunt, suggests that she and her brother Edward may perhaps have been christened (with names not traditional in their family) after Ed Rivers, hero of Frances Brooke 's The History of Emily Montague, and his sister Lucy, an ideally loving and mutually supportive pair of siblings.
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
36
Feminist Companion Archive.
Gentleman’s Magazine. Various publishers.
134 (1864) 1: 396

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