Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743-1825)
by Mary A. Waters
Barbauld's career opened under her birth name, Anna Aikin, with publication by the Warrington Academy's Eyres Press of Corsica: An Ode (1768), followed by Poems, also first published at Warrington by Eyres Press (1772) before being reprinted in London by Joseph Johnson (1773). The same year, she collaborated with her brother, John Aikin, on a volume of Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (1773).
After she married dissenting clergyman Rochemont Barbauld and the two opened a school, Anna Barbauld authored children's literature and educational materials, including the various installments of Lessons for Children (1775-1788) and Hymns in Prose for Children (1781), which were well loved. She began roughly a decade of political writing with An Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (1790), quickly followed by the abolitionist poem Epistle to Mr. Wilberforce on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade (1791).
Barbauld's known career in criticism began with a preface to Mark Akenside's The Pleasures of Imagination (1794), followed by the preface to William Collins's Poetical Works (1797), an edition of Selections from Spectator, Tatler, Guardian, and Freeholder, also with a prefatory essay (1804), and a selection of The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (1804). The British Novelists (1810) constitutes her most ambitious critical project with its lengthy preface "The Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing" and the critical biographical prefaces for each author.
In addition to these major works of criticism, Barbauld pursued a long career of periodical reviewing and criticism dating from around 1797 or 1798 up through at least 1815. Her reviews probably included contributions to the Analytical Review, her nephew Arthur Aikin's Annual Review, the Athenæum and the Monthly Magazine while her brother was affiliated with them, the Gentleman's Magazine, and most prolifically, the Monthly Review, to which she contributed several hundred articles on fiction, poetry, educational literature, and several other topics.
Barbauld's last major publication was the poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812), for which she received some harsh reviews, but even after this disappointment she continued to publish short poems and literary criticism as well as to arrange her work for a contemplated but never executed complete works edition.
Works in the Criticism Archive
- Akenside's Poem on the Pleasures of Imagination
- The British Novelists, with an Essay, and Prefaces Biographical and Critical by Mrs. Barbauld, including:
- An Inquiry into Those Kinds of Distress which Excite Agreeable Sensations: With a Tale, Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose
- Life of Samuel Richardson, The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson
- On Novel Writing, The Literary Magazine and American Register
- On the Poetical Works of Mr. William Collins, The Poetical Works of Mr. William Collins. With a Prefatory Essay by Mrs. Barbauld
- On Romances, an Imitation, Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose
- Preliminary Essay to the Selections from the Spectator
Articles on JSTOR About
Mary A. Waters, Laura Mandell, "Anna Letitia Barbauld." The Criticism Archive, published by Romantic Circles, 2026
https://cha.artsci.tamu.edu/CriticismArchive/authors/Barbauld.html