Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Anna Letitia Barbauld
-
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.
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
Jane Porter
The Porters' mother lived a busy social life on limited means, and JP
kept up this tradition. Sir Walter Scott
was an early friend.
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 116. Gale Research, 1992.
265
When she moved to London, JP
included among her friends...
Friends, Associates
Mary Hays
After Wollstonecraft's death, and Fenwick's departure from England, it seems unlikely that MH
found female friends to replace them, though she knew well such people as Elizabeth Inchbald
, Anna Letitia Barbauld
, and Charles
Friends, Associates
Hannah More
Here she began to gather the circle of friends which by the end of her long life had touched every cranny of English society. She had already met Edmund Burke
in Bristol the previous September...
Betham, Ernest, editor. A House of Letters. Jarrold and Sons, 1905.
69, 70
MMB
acquired a wide acquaintance in London. She became a close friend...
Friends, Associates
Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck
The first visit which Mary Anne Galton (later MAS
) made away from home was a month at Hampstead with Anna Letitia Barbauld
.
Schimmelpenninck, Mary Anne. Life of Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck. Editor Hankin, Christiana C., Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1858, 2 vols.
2: 7
Friends, Associates
Hannah More
Her later friendships often blended the personal with the political, like those with Beilby Porteus
(Bishop of London from 1787, where she met him) and the abolitionists William Wilberforce
(met at Bath the same year)...
In her memoirs LA
claims to have been acquainted with all the notable literary women of her time. She was a close friend of Joanna Baillie
and Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
. Another important friend and...
Cottle, Joseph. Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey. 2nd ed., Houlston and Stoneman, 1847.
54
Algernon Knox
(a precursor of late Victorian High Churchmanship), Anna Letitia Barbauld
, Elizabeth Fry
, and a goodly...
Friends, Associates
Amelia Opie
AO
's friendship with Anne
and Annabella Plumptre
(daughters of Robert Plumptre
, Prebend of Norwich, both of whom grew up to be writers) dated from their shared childhood.
Plumptre, Anne. “Introduction”. Something New, edited by Deborah McLeod, Broadview, 1996, p. vii - xxix.
xxvi, ix-x
Her friendship with the...
Friends, Associates
Amelia Opie
In London she met many artists, writers, and politically active reformists: as well as Godwin
, she met Elizabeth Inchbald
, Mary Wollstonecraft
(who impressed her deeply, and trusted her enough to confide her plans...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Grant
As the title implies, this was written on the model of Anna Letitia Barbauld
's Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, though it also rebukes what AG
would have seen as Barbauld's defeatism and failure of...
