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 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
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 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 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 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.
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...
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...
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. Todd, Janet and Marilyn ButlerEditors , Pickering, 1989.
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...

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,