Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Anna Letitia Barbauld
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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.
In The Seasons, one volume represents each season—probably on the model of Anna Letitia Barbauld
's treatment of scenes from each month in turn in writing for children of the same age. These books...
Textual Features
Susanna Watts
Ephemera of all kinds have been bound in: family anecdotes, a letter of William Cowper
of 1788, a Hindu Primer (or alphabet), a railway ticket of 1839, women's parliamentary petitions against slavery of 1833 (one...
Textual Features
Muriel Jaeger
MJ
here traces the shift from eighteenth-century tolerance and scepticism to Victorian religious earnestness. She makes good use of writing during these periods, including writing by women (novels, diaries, letters, memoirs), showing herself a highly...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
EOB
writes in terms of a women's tradition: for instance, she praises Barbauld
for praising Elizabeth Rowe
. She makes confident judgements and attributions (she is sure that Lady Pakington
is the real author of...
Though most of her anthologized writers are men, LA
includes Hannah More
, Anna Letitia Barbauld
, and Lady Luxborough
. Perhaps recalling her own childhood activism, she included anti-slavery poems.
Textual Features
Mary Anne Jevons
An anonymous preface dated from Liverpool in October 1830 said that this annual would not set out to rival more splendid ones: it would offer mostly devotional poems, and none that were not improving. MAJ
Textual Features
Mary Wollstonecraft
Though only about twenty percent of its extracts are written by women (the same proportion as from the Bible),
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
501
this book is feminist in its emphasis on the virtue of independent judgement as...
The children in the story, whose characters have been spoiled by upbringing in the West Indies, are at first unwilling to visit the bookshop, but they find it a delightful, pretty, and fashionable...
Textual Features
Maria Riddell
MR
's own twenty poems include prefatory verses as editor, written for the occasion. She prints work by the late Henrietta O'Neill
(the well-known Ode to the Poppy), Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire
(St...
Textual Features
Eliza Fenwick
For this anthology EF
gathered mostly improving pedagogical material, drawing on revered literary names like Shakespeare
and Milton
, as well as more recent and controversial writers like Thomas Chatterton
and Helen Maria Williams
...
Textual Production
Sarah Trimmer
ST
's Little Spelling Book for Young Children (designed, she said, to teach the user enough to read Barbauld
's Lessons for Children) reached a second edition by August 1786. As a kind of...
