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.
The Critical Review introduced its laudatory notice by praising the current standard of women's poetry (a tradition, it says, less than a century old). It invokes the canonical names of Seward
, Barbauld
, and...
Literary responses
Joanna Baillie
The Critical Review assumed the author was male. It thought the versification monotonous but warmly praised both preface and plays.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
24 (1798): 1-22
Initial reaction from individuals (mostly favourable) concentrated on the puzzle of authorship...
Literary responses
Joanna Baillie
The Critical Review called this volume a work of such great and original merit,
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
2d ser. 37: 201
though it also said that JB
's initial success had been fed by her anonymity. Anna Letitia Barbauld
Occupation
Lucy Aikin
In 1803 LA
and her aunt Anna Letitia Barbauld
founded an all-women book club at Stoke Newington. The officers were all women, and Aikin boasted that not a single man is admitted, even to...
Occupation
John Wilson Croker
JWC
became a lawyer, (moving from Ireland to London after the Act of Union) a Tory
MP, an editor of several eighteenth-century texts (including letters by Lady Hervey
and by Henrietta Howard, Lady Suffolk
)...
Occupation
Lucy Toulmin Smith
Manchester College (now Harris Manchester College
) had a long and distinguished history as a Dissenting institution (including spells at York and London) before it moved to Oxford in 1889 and into new buildings...
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
284
Keen, Paul. “Review”. Eighteenth Century Fiction, Vol.
14
, No. 2, Jan. 2002, pp. 229-35.
234
Kelly, Gary. Women, Writing, and Revolution 1790-1827. Clarendon, 1993.
47
Author summary
Sarah Trimmer
ST
's writing arose out of her work for two causes, religion and education, brought most closely together in her interest in Sunday schools. She edited magazines and was a pioneer both in animal stories...
Publishing
Hannah Brand
It was printed at Norwich and sold through London publishers. The subscription list was impressive, including Anna Letitia Barbauld
, John Brand (presumably HB
's brother) of Hemingston Hall in Suffolk, who took twenty copies...
Publishing
Amelia Opie
Very early in her life Amelia Alderson (later AO
) began writing poems, songs, and several plays. An old manuscript book of hers, dated by Cecilia Brightwell
1791, seems to have contained one poem from...
George Dyer
warmly praised AJ
in his poem On Liberty, which appeared in his Poems of 1792. Since he also praised Wollstonecraft
's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Charlotte Smith
,...
Reception
Mary Hays
Anna Letitia Barbauld
shortly afterwards joined in the same public debate.
Residence
Winifred Peck
Winifred was very young when her father resigned his Merton College fellowship in order to move from Oxford and take to country living at Kibworth in Leicestershire (just near the birthplace of Anna Letitia Barbauld
