Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment

The biographies of women writers of the eighteenth-century have been multiplying in the wake of cautions against sweeping narratives about women at particular moments in time. To study the uniqueness of an author’s circumstances and motivations is to take women’s studies more seriously. Anna Letitia Barbauld has been relatively illusive to those who have tried to piece together her biography, and much debate had surfaced around how to reclaim a woman who was so maligned in her time. Yet, Barbauld’s life story is particularly interesting, since she successfully published throughout the later half of the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth in a wide range of genres, including poetry, devotional pieces, educational texts, sermons, essays and political tracts, literary criticism, and the correspondence of Samuel Richardson. Most importantly Barbauld engaged with pressing questions of her time, including civic humanism, slavery, and Dissenter rights.

Part of the problem in retelling her story is that a major portion of Barbauld’s writing work was done alone in her twenties, between 1763 and 1773, long before she was a well-known author. Because of the private nature of this writing, very little of her poetry before 1772 can be dated, which unfortunately means that her poetic development can also not be traced. Also Barbauld did not immediately publish her texts. Instead she circulated them among her friends in and from her hometown of Warrington. Many of these readers who celebrated her poems facilitated her more public life as an author. However, today the pervasiveness of her writing and her influence in such a wide variety of spheres, including her progressive views on children’s education, has often been overlooked.

McCarthy’s biography works through Barbauld’s life chronologically, emphasizing the role of Dissenter ideology in her intellectual formation. A thoughtful family tapestry illustrates her childhood, even when information is minimal. The narrative progresses through Barbauld’s education in science, reading, French, and Stoicism, as well as her close relationship with her brother, John Aiken and Joseph and Mary Priestly, who fostered her ideas about liberty. It details to the greatest extent possible Barbauld’s “Land of Matrimony,” alluding to her ultimate mysterious marriage to Rochemont Barbauld, which began happily and may have been strengthened by his dissenting beliefs embraced after the tutelage of Anna Letitia’s father and to which Anna Letitia passionately identified. However, it was also marred by Rochemont’s psychological breaks. Barbauld’s faith was central to her; however, rather than doctrine and sobermindedness, McCarthy shows that Barbauld was more interested in devotion and intimacy with God. To that end, he points to her understanding of grace, noting that “conspicuously absent from Hymns [in Prose for Children], to the annoyance of religious conservatives in years to come, was any conception of sin and punishment.” (212).

The Palgrave school for boys was a formative time for Barbauld, as she had grown up around boys and later taught future “patriots and citizens.” Her educational writing, Lessons for Children and Hymns, as well as “On Education” were inspired by her students and their son, Charles. McCarthy explains that Lessons can be aligned with “Enlightenment programs of educational reform” and is part of “Barbauld’s project of creating a better kind of citizen.” Lessons and Hymns exceeds previous children’s curriculum in scope and ambition as well as in “stylistic grace,” “subtlety,” “philosophical stature,” and “intellectual inventiveness.” (214) These Lessons and Hymns, in fact, earned her the moniker as “a star of infant education.” (192) After running the school and traveling to London and Paris, she and her husband settled north of London in Hampstead, where Barbauld became a more public figure, publishing essays and poems in the Monthly Magazine and writing against the slave trade. As “the highest literary character in England,” she edited Samuel Richardson’s letters, selected essays for the Spectator, introduced twenty-eight novels and twenty-one British novelists (which included a defense of the novel as a valuable genre (428)), and reviewed for the Monthly Magazine.

Barbauld’s essays against slavery, employing her “rhetorical jujitsu” (322), brought her both praise and scorn. Her sophisticated writing was often misunderstood, and her “The Rights of Woman” is easily read out of context (352). In “What is Education” and “On Prejudice,” Barbauld “articulated a basic idea of existentialism ninety years before Martin Heidegger was born.” McCarthy also provides many engaging readings of Barbauld’s work alongside Hume, Blake, Hutchinson, and Epictetus. Because Barbauld called attention to these matters of social justice McCarthy sees her as “a point of concentration for a male fear and resentment of women that ordinarily circulates more diffusely” (454). However, Barbauld’s life work in some ways ends in frustration, as she saw little progress in her struggle for justice. Even without the satisfaction of witnessing the fruit of her labor, she continued to promote women’s minds through her writing, and she befriended and supported many intelligent young women. Contrary to earlier claims, gender is not the reason that Barbauld hesitated to publish. McCarthy shows that Barbauld’s reticence had more to do with her family than with threats of being thought unfeminine (107).

Although it is a hefty read, at 725 pages, what could be cut? Perhaps some would find the extended descriptions of cultural and political moments, the extra example, the contemporary with a similar or slightly different point unnecessary. However, these are well-chosen and carefully integrated and result in a fascinating comprehensive narrative. McCarthy asserts in his afterward “Wisdom in Time of Need” that Barbauld teaches wisdom, but that “literary modernists” resist this, “scorning writing intent on ‘reforming’ them.” McCarthy’s interest in Barbauld’s ethical agency is clear throughout this biography. Since Barbauld herself took her didacticism quite seriously, this does not seem out of place.

McCarthy’s notes and citations are impressively extensive and his integration of fact and narrative result in fascinating reading. Though perhaps difficult because of lack of evidence, a chronological list of all of Barbauld’s works would have been helpful for most readers. However, this omission also points to McCarthy’s attention to accuracy, as much of her work is difficult to date. He is careful not to embellish, staying loyal to the evidence and being reluctant to overly conjecture. Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment is a comprehensive and convincing tour de force, which expertly demonstrates Barbauld’s influence and public role in the second half of the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth. It weaves a detailed, informative, and often riveting story of one woman author’s far reaching influence and will be enjoyed by a wide range of readers.