Lucy Aikin

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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.
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.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Birth Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
EOB was born at West Camel in Somerset.
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, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
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, 1827.
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...
Family and Intimate relationships Anna Letitia Barbauld
ALB 's niece Lucy Aikin , youngest daughter of her brother John, became a writer, and later edited and published ALB 's works.
Family and Intimate relationships Anna Letitia Barbauld
Rochemont Barbauld came from a French Huguenot family and had a strong foreign accent as a result of spending his childhood abroad. He was ALB 's junior by six years, small in stature, emotionally unstable...
Friends, Associates Anna Letitia Barbauld
The literary society of ALB 's time was, as biographer Betsy Rodgers notes, small and intimate.
Rodgers, Betsy. Georgian Chronicle: Mrs Barbauld and her Family. Methuen, 1958.
80
Writers all knew each other and kept in touch; those who did not live in London visited frequently...
Friends, Associates Fanny Kemble
Dr William Ellery Channing , an American Unitarian and friend of Lucy Aikin , met and befriended FK . His views came to influence hers.
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Marshall, Dorothy. Fanny Kemble. Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977.
93
She also met Harriet Martineau while in the USA.
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...
Friends, Associates Harriet Martineau
Anna Letitia Barbauld visited HM 's mother from time to time. HM was impressed by the stamp of superiority on all she said.
Martineau, Harriet, and Gaby Weiner. Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography. Virago, 1983.
1: 302
Barbauld's niece Lucy Aikin was another family friend. One acquaintance...
Friends, Associates Joanna Baillie
Over the course of her long life JB made dozens of well-loved friends, many of them either professional writers like herself or else writing amateurs. They included Lucy Aikin , Mary Berry , Eliza Fletcher
Intertextuality and Influence Barbara Hofland
Barbara Hoole engages her reader through expressions both of emotion and of opinion. Though she handles some political topics (rejoicing, for instance, at the peace of Amiens in 1802), she is preoccupied by the personal...
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Ann Kelty
MAK 's opinions are always idiosyncratic and interesting, but she is not a feminist. She quotes Lucy Aikin on being wounded by the privileged insolence of masculine discourse,
Kelty, Mary Ann. The Solace of a Solitaire. Trübner and Co., 1869.
332
only to disagree. I confess that...
Intertextuality and Influence Sarah Wentworth Morton
The title-page quotes romantic, melancholy lines from Byron 's Childe Harold.
Bottorff, William K., and Sarah Wentworth Morton. “Introduction”. My Mind and its Thoughts, Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975, pp. 5 - 16.
12
An Apology closing the volume speaks of SWM 's disappointments and distresses (which are often mentioned, though unspecified, in her work) especially...
Literary responses Queen Elizabeth I
The immense and long-lasting interest aroused by Elizabeth is not, of course, primarily due to her writings, any more than were the adulation paid her during her lifetime, the cult of Gloriana, the Virgin Queen...
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 Eliza Fletcher
She received letters of praise and congratulation on this publication from a number of distinguished pens. Anne Grant wrote characteristically that they far exceeded my expectations. She had expected exalted moral feeling, purity of sentiment...

Timeline

9 September 1803
The first number appeared of the Annual Review, a Dissenting periodical run by Lucy Aikin 's brother Arthur Aikin , which had been planned in 1802.
By Christmas 1869
Francis Galton , mathematician, scientist, and eugenicist, published Hereditary Genius: An Enquiry into its Laws and Consequences,