Portal:Biography/Selected article/July 12

Anna Laetitia Barbauld (/bɑːrˈboʊld/, by herself possibly /bɑːrˈboʊ/, as in French) (née Aikin) (June 20, 1743 – March 9, 1825) was a prominent eighteenth-century British 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. 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. 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. (Read more...)