William Enfield

For this her great support and encouragement was her brother (as he, rather than her husband , continued to be for her later publications). After he left home to pursue his studies, she sent him...

To all eyes she lived as Munby's servant; she often still slept in the basement kitchen. In the evenings, however, she played the role of a lady wife, sitting with Munby in the parlour, conversing...

HW 's story of her education is one of tyranny and resistance. Her worst beating from her father was incurred for obstinacy. Her elder sister Jane (called Diana in her memoirs) was supposed to teach...

The literary society of ALB 's time was, as biographer Betsy Rodgers notes, small and intimate. Writers all knew each other and kept in touch; those who did not live in London visited frequently...

William Enfield quoted eight lines from Aikin (as Our Poetess) in dedicating his very popular anthology The Speaker, designed for the teaching of elocution, to the head of Warrington Academy . Her volume...

The full title is The Female Reader: or, Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and Verse: Selected from the Best Writers, and Disposed under Proper Heads; for the Improvement of Young Women. MW said she had...

Reviewers were impressed. The Critical praised the author's great knowledge of the world and her soundness of judgement, both natural and acquired: Considered as a female writer, (we beg pardon of the ladies for this...

The Critical Review treated this work with respect while placing it firmly in an inferior category: strictly moral and generally pleasing . . . . We wish our circulating libraries were always so well supplied...

Again, the two leading journals endorsed LMW 's project. Enfield in the Monthly thought the work well designed to answer its laudable purpose of instruction, and the Critical Review used the book as a peg...

William Enfield wrote in the Monthly Review that this book must stand or fall by its moral merit. He found the first volume better than the second, and the language natural, but never elegant and...

This work was controversial. William Enfield in the Monthly Review praised it and endorsed its opinions.Mary Wollstonecraft quoted from Barbauld's Thoughts on the Devotional Taste in her own preface to The Female Reader...

This time the Critical Review seems not to have recognised the same hand in this narrative, with several letters interspersed as in LMW 's earlier works. While it approved the characters, the knowledge exhibited, and...

The Critical Review found this one romantic but plausible, with well supported characters, virtuous sentiments, and situations extremely interesting to the tenderest feelings of the heart.William Enfield in the Monthly agreed with a good...

William Enfield in the Monthly Review praised the novel only faintly, although he admitted that the story was well told.

The Critical Review sounded somewhat divided in its judgement. It commended this work's general good sense and tendency, and found the incidents, in the first volume at any rate, probable, interesting, and affecting, and interspersed...