Anna Laetitia Barbauld (pronounced /bɑrˈboʊld/, by herself possibly /bɑrˈboʊ/, as in French) (née Aikin) (20 June 1743 – 9 March 1825) was a prominent eighteenth-century English poet, essayist, and children's author. A "woman of letters" who published in multiple genres, Barbauld had a successful writing career at a time when female professional writers were rare. She was a noted teacher at the celebrated Palgrave Academy and an innovative children's writer; her famous primers provided a model for pedagogy for more than a century.[1] Her essays demonstrated that it was possible for a woman to be publicly engaged in politics, and other women authors emulated her.[2] Even more importantly, her poetry was foundational to the development of Romanticism in England.[3] Barbauld was also a literary critic, and her anthology of eighteenth-century British novels helped establish the canon as we know it today. Barbauld's literary career ended abruptly in 1812 with the publication of her poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, which criticized Britain's participation in the Napoleonic Wars. The vicious reviews shocked Barbauld and she published nothing else within her lifetime.[4] Her reputation was further damaged when many of the Romantic poets she had inspired in the heyday of the French Revolution turned against her in their later, more conservative, years. Barbauld was remembered only as a pedantic children's writer during the nineteenth century, and largely forgotten during the twentieth century, but the rise of feminist literary criticism in the 1980s renewed interest in her works and restored her place in literary history.[5] Barbauld was born on 20 June 1743 at Kibworth Harcourt in Leicestershire, England. Her father, Reverend John Aikin, was headmaster of the Dissenting Kibworth Academy and minister at a nearby Presbyterian church. Her family's residence at Kibworth afforded Barbauld the opportunity to learn Latin, Greek, French, Italian, and many other subjects deemed unsuitable for women at the time. Barbauld’s penchant for study worried her mother, who expected her to end up a spinster because of her intellectualism; the two were never as close as Barbauld and her father.[6] Yet Barbauld's mother was proud of her accomplishments and in later years wrote of her daughter: “I once indeed knew a little girl who was as eager to learn as her instructors could be to teach her, and who at two years old could read sentences and little stories in her wise book, roundly, without spelling; and in half a year more could read as well as most women; but I never knew such another, and I believe never shall.”[7] In 1758, the family moved to the soon-to-be-famous Warrington Academy, in Warrington, where Barbauld’s father had been offered a teaching position. It drew many luminaries of the day, such as the natural philosopher and theologian Joseph Priestley, and came to be known as “the Athens of the North” for its stimulating intellectual atmosphere.[8] One other luminary may have been the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat; school records suggest he was a “French master” there in the 1770s. He may also have been a suitor to the beautiful, accomplished Barbauld; he allegedly wrote to John Aikin declaring his intention to become an English citizen and to marry her.[9] Archibald Hamilton Rowan also fell in love with Barbauld and described her as, "possessed of great beauty, distinct traces of which she retained to the latest of her life. Her person was slender, her complexion exquisitely fair with the bloom of perfect health; her features regular and elegant, and her dark blue eyes beamed with the light of wit and fancy.”[10] Despite her mother's anxiety, Barbauld received many offers of marriage around this time—all of which she turned down. In 1773, Barbauld brought out her first book of poems, after her friends had praised them and convinced her to publish.[12] The collection, entitled simply Poems, went through four editions in just one year and surprised Barbauld by its success.[12] Barbauld became a respected literary figure in England on the reputation of Poems alone. The same year she and her brother, John Aikin, jointly published Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, which was also well-received. The essays in it (most of which were by Barbauld) were favorably compared to Samuel Johnson's.[13] In May 1774, despite some "misgivings", Barbauld married Rochemont Barbauld, the grandson of a French Huguenot and a former pupil at Warrington. According to Barbauld's niece, Lucy Aikin: After the wedding, the couple moved to Suffolk, near where Rochemont had been offered a congregation and a school for boys.[15] Barbauld took this time and rewrote some of the psalms, a common pastime in the eighteenth century, publishing them as Devotional Pieces Compiled from the Psalms and the Book of Job. Attached to this work is her essay “Thoughts on the Devotional Taste, on Sects and on Establishments”, which explains her theory of religious feeling and the problems inherent in the institutionalization of religion. It seems that Barbauld and her husband were concerned that they would never have a child of their own and in 1775, after only a year of marriage, Barbauld suggested to her brother that they adopt one of his children: Eventually her brother conceded and the couple adopted Charles; it was for him that Barbauld wrote her most famous books: Lessons for Children (1778–9) and Hymns in Prose for Children (1781). Barbauld and her husband spent eleven years teaching at Palgrave Academy in Suffolk. Early on, Barbauld was not only responsible for running her own household but also the school’s—she was accountant, maid, and housekeeper.[17] The school opened with only eight boys but when the Barbaulds left in 1785, around forty were enrolled, a testament to the excellent reputation the school had acquired.[18] The Barbaulds’ educational philosophy attracted Dissenters as well as Anglicans. Palgrave replaced the strict discipline of traditional schools such as Eton, which often used corporal punishment, with a system of “fines and jobations” and even, it seems likely, “juvenile trials,” that is, trials run by and for the students themselves.[19] Moreover, instead of the traditional classical studies, the school offered a practical curriculum that stressed science and the modern languages. Barbauld herself taught the foundational subjects of reading and religion to the youngest boys and geography, history, composition and rhetoric, and science to higher grade levels.[20] She was a dedicated teacher, producing a “weekly chronicle” for the school and writing theatrical pieces for the students to perform.[21] Barbauld had a profound effect on many of her students; one who went on to great success, William Taylor, a preeminent scholar of German literature, referred to Barbauld as “the mother of his mind.”[22] In September 1785, the Barbaulds left Palgrave for a tour of France; Rochemont’s mental health had been deteriorating and he was no longer able to carry out his teaching duties.[23] In 1787, they moved to Hampstead where Rochemont was asked to head a Presbyterian chapel. It was here that Barbauld became close friends with Joanna Baillie, the playwright. Although no longer in charge of a school, the Barbaulds did not abandon their commitment to education; they often had one or two pupils living with them, who had been recommend by personal friends.[24] It was during this time, the heyday of the French Revolution, that Barbauld published her most radical political pieces. From 1787 to 1790, Charles James Fox attempted to convince the House of Commons to pass a law granting Dissenters full citizenship rights. When this bill was defeated for the third time, Barbauld wrote one of her most passionate pamphlets, An Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts. Readers were shocked to discover that such a well-reasoned argument should come from a woman. In 1791, after William Wilberforce's attempt to outlaw the slave trade failed, Barbauld published her Epistle to William Wilberforce Esq. On the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade, which not only lamented the fate of the slaves but also warned of the cultural and social degeneration the British could expect if they did not abandon slavery. In 1792, she continued this theme of national responsibility in an anti-war sermon entitled Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation which argued that each individual is responsible for the actions of the nation: “We are called upon to repent of national sins, because we can help them, and because we ought to help them.”[25] In 1802, the Barbaulds moved to Stoke Newington where Rochemont took over the pastoral duties of the Chapel at Newington Green. Barbauld herself was happy to be nearer her brother, John, because her husband’s mind was rapidly failing.[26] Rochemont developed a “violent antipathy to his wife and he was liable to fits of insane fury directed against her. One day at dinner he seized a knife and chased her round the table so that she only saved herself by jumping out of the window.”[27] Such scenes repeated themselves to Barbauld’s great sadness and real danger, but she refused to leave him. Rochemont drowned himself in the nearby New River in 1808 and Barbauld was overcome with grief. When Barbauld returned to writing, she produced the radical poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812) that depicted England as a ruin. It was reviewed so viciously that Barbauld never published another work within her lifetime, although it is now often viewed by scholars as her greatest poetic achievement.[28] Barbauld died in 1825, a renowned writer, and was buried in the family vault in St Mary's, Stoke Newington. After Barbauld’s death, a marble tablet was erected in the Newington Green Chapel with the following inscription: At her death, Barbauld was lauded in the Newcastle Magazine as “unquestionably the first [i.e., best] of our female poets, and one of the most eloquent and powerful of our prose writers” and the Imperial Magazine declared “so long as letters shall be cultivated in Britain, or wherever the English language shall be known, so long will the name of this lady be respected.”[30] She was favorably compared to both Joseph Addison and Samuel Johnson, no mean feat for a woman writer in the eighteenth century.[31] But by 1925 she was remembered only as a moralizing writer for children, if that. It was not until the advent of feminist literary criticism within the academy in the 1970s and 1980s that Barbauld finally began to be included in literary history.