The Collected Works of Anna Letitia Barbauld
presents, for the first time, all the known surviving works of this major English writer, who lived from 1743 to 1825. Poet, essayist, editor, innovative writer for children, polemicist for religious and political reform, Barbauld helped set the agenda for Anglo-American culture for over a century. Her poems influenced Coleridge and Wordsworth; her writings on education, church-state relations, identity politics, and the ethics of citizenship are freshly relevant today; her commentary on books and writers went far to establish today's canon of English novelists. Beyond their importance, her writings are distinguished by great charm and profound intelligence.
Volume IV, Essays and Discourses
continues the recovery of this gifted writer by bringing back into print her influential essays and powerful political tracts, and by reprinting for the first time thirty magazine essays and
jeux-d'esprit
not previously identified as hers.
The edition of Barbauld's writings published in 1825 by her niece, Lucy Aikin, omitted at least half of Barbauld's work, all of it prose; and while Aikin did reprint Barbauld's political tracts, she belittled their historical context—the reform movement in England, in response to the French Revolution—and thus helped to create the figure known to Victorian feminists as "good Mrs. Barbauld."
Barbauld's importance as a writer for children has long been acknowledged. However, her significance as a political writer is only now being recognized as the British reform movement has come to be better understood. Her full achievement as a satirist and humorist is revealed for the first time in this volume through its attribution of essays she sent to her brother's
Monthly Magazine
and
Athenaeum
. Scrupulously edited, annotated, and collected as fully as is now possible, the texts in this volume reveal a writer of sharp intelligence, moral passion, wit, and humor.