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.
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...
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Elizabeth Cobbold
EC
read Anna Letitia Barbauld
's Eighteen Hundred and Eleven and said it was only the more dangerous on account of its poetical excellence.
qtd. in
Feminist Companion Archive.
She was a subscriber for Mary Sewell
in 1803. As well...
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Eliza Fenwick
Another of EF
's children's books, Lessons for Children, first appeared in 1809 and went through a number of editions as well as a French translation published by M. J. Godwin
in 1820.
Grundy, Isobel, and Eliza Fenwick. “Introduction and Appendices”. Secresy, 2nd ed., Broadview, 1998, pp. 7 - 34, 361.
15
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Elizabeth Inchbald
EI
, or others involved, must have declined to participate in the Longman
's project reported by Catherine Hutton
on 13 June 1816, for a women's periodical intended to bear the names of Inchbald, Barbauld
Callow, Steven D. “A Biographical Sketch of Lady Anne Thackeray Ritchie”. Virginia Woolf Quarterly, Vol.
2
, 1980, pp. 285-7.
289
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Ann Taylor Gilbert
ATG
later remembered that she was writing poetry at seven or eight. She also planned large literary projects
qtd. in
Gilbert, Ann Taylor. Autobiography and Other Memorials of Mrs. Gilbert. Editor Gilbert, Josiah, H. S. King, 1874, 2 vols., http://U of A, HSS Ruth N .
1: 46
including a prequel to Homer
's Iliad. Like Frances Burney
, she tried to...
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Frances Jacson
This is another novel ascribed in earlier sources to Alethea Lewis
, and available through Chawton
Novels On-line at http://www.chawtonhouse.org/?page_id=55488. Two plot-elements, indeed, are parallelled in Lewis's life: the motherless heroine, Caroline, and the long-drawn-out...
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Maria Edgeworth
ME
revised Belinda for inclusion in A. L. Barbauld
's series of The British Novelists.
Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Clarendon, 1972.
494-5
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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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Lucy Aikin
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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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...
