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.
Anna Letitia Le Breton
, niece of LA
, published two works concerning her: Memoir of Mrs. Barbauld (based on Aikin's manuscript FamilyHistory) and her correspondence with William Ellery Channing
.
Aikin, Lucy. Correspondence of William Ellery Channing, D. D., and Lucy Aikin, from 1826 to 1842. Editor Le Breton, Anna Letitia, Roberts, 1874.
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Maria Edgeworth
ME
's early letters to her friend Fanny Robinson
are earnest and priggish. By the 1790s she was sending the Ruxtons letters which have literary merit in themselves (mixing amusing anecdote and expressions of affection)...
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Elizabeth Hamilton
EH
would clearly have been unable, for health reasons, to participate in the abortive Longman
's project reported by Catherine Hutton
very shortly before Hamilton died—a projected women's periodical, which was to bear EH
's...
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Ann Jebb
AJ
published Two Penny-worth of Truth for a Penny; or, A True State of Facts, With an apology for Tom Bull in a letter to brother John, a pamphlet in answer to one by...
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Maria Edgeworth
In July 1804 ME
proposed to Anna Letitia Barbauld
a scheme for a periodical to be written both for and by women. The timing, however, was unfortunate, and Barbauld declined.
Manly, Susan. “Maria Edgeworth (1768-1846)”. The Female Spectator (1995-), Vol.
10
, No. 2, 1 June 2006– 2024, pp. 1-3.
3
McCarthy, William. “Why Anna Letitia Barbauld Refused to Head a Women’s College: New Facts, New Story”. Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Vol.
23
, No. 3, 2001, pp. 349-79.
351-2
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Elizabeth Carter
Anna Letitia Barbauld
first revealed that EC
wrote five paragraphs (regarded as authoritative) in a conversational debate among characters in Richardson
's Sir Charles Grandison on Man's usurpation, and woman's natural independency.
Richardson, Samuel. Sir Charles Grandison. Editor Harris, Jocelyn, Worlds Classics, Oxford University Press, 1986.
3: 242 and n
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Maria Edgeworth
The Longman
's project reported by Catherine Hutton
on 13 June this year, for a women's periodical bearing the names of ME
, BarbauldInchbald
, and Hamilton
, seems not to have materialised. It...
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Felicia Hemans
These were collected in her next volume, Translations. Hemans joined a number of other women who had lamented the death of the princess in childbirth on 6 November 1817: Margaret Croker
, Susanna Watts
Though LA
continued to write for children, and edited various writings by her aunt
and her father
, she did not think of herself as a writer in the same sense that they were. Her...
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Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck
The full title of the main work was The Principles of Beauty as Manifested in Nature, Art, and Human Character, with a classification of deformities. The subsidiary works included in the volume were An...
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Lucy Aikin
LA
memoir of Anna Letitia Barbauld
, in her edition of Barbauld's Works, June 1825, represents a well-planned if largely unsuccessful attempt to establish and preserve Barbauld's reputation after systemic attack by political conservatives...
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Susanna Haswell Rowson
The London edition, from William Lane's Minerva Press, appeared in probably late 1799 (without the author's preface). A scholarly edition by Joseph F. Bartolomeo
came out in 2009.
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press, 2000, 2 vols.
His De la littérature des Nègres in its original form reflects internationalism, anglophilia, and perhaps even proto-feminism. The title-page quotes Mary Robinson
. The roll of honour of white activists for abolition and racial equality...
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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...
