Selected Bibliography:
Anna Letitia Barbauld
(1743-1825)

By Daniel E. White,
University of Toronto

Last revised 15 June 2002

Bibliographies

• J. R. de J. Jackson, Romantic Poetry by Women: A Bibliography, 1770-1835 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 17-19.
• William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft, eds., The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1994), 365-77. See as well McCarthy and Kraft's list of MS, printed book, and periodical sources, 351-63.

Editions

• Collected Works

  • Lucy Aikin, ed., The Works of Anna Lætitia Barbauld, with a Memoir by Lucy Aikin, vol. I (London: Longman, 1825). Following her "Memoir," Aikin gives the 1773 Poems, to which she adds: "An Inventory of the Furniture of Dr. Priestley's Study" (follows "Characters"), "On the Deserted Village" (follows "On a Lady's Writing"), "Epithalamium" (follows "Ode to Spring"), and "To a Dog" (follows "Verses on Mrs. Rowe"). Aikin prints Barbauld's Hymns at the end of the volume. Reprinted in facsimile, Routledge/Thoemmes, 1996.
  • Lucy Aikin, ed., The Works of Anna Lætitia Barbauld, with a Memoir by Lucy Aikin, vol. II (London: Longman, 1825). Following Barbauld's letters (see "Correspondence," below), Aikin prints the six essays attributed to Barbauld in Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (see "Individual Works: Prose," below), followed by "Thoughts on the Devotional Taste, and on Sects and Establishments," "The Curé of the Banks of the Rhone," "Zephyrus and Flora," "On Evil: A Rhapsody," "Dialogue between Madame Cosmogunia and a Philosophical Inquirer of the Eighteenth Century," "Letter of John Bull," "Letter on Watering-places," "On Education," "On Prejudice," "Dialogue in the Shades," "Knowledge and her Daughter: A Fable," "An Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts," "Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation; or, a Discourse for the Fast, appointed on April 19, 1793," and "Remarks on Mr. Gilbert Wakefield's Enquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of Public or Social Worship."
  • William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft, eds., The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1994).
  • William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft, eds., Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2002).
  
  

• Individual Works: Poetry

  • Poems (London: J. Johnson, 1773).
  • Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq., on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade (London: J. Johnson, 1791).
  • Poems. A new edition, corrected. To which is added, An Epistle to William Wilberforce (London: J. Johnson, 1792). Reprinted, Woodstock 1993.
  • Odes, by George Dyer, M. Robinson, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, J. Ogilvie, &c. (Ludlow: G. Nicholson, 1800). Reprinted, Garland 1979.
  • Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, a Poem (London: J. Johnson, 1812). Reprinted, Woodstock 1995.
  
  

• Individual Works: Prose

  • [With John Aikin] Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (London: J. Johnson, 1773). The volume consists of 10 essays: "On the Province of Comedy," "The Hill of Science, a Vision" [Anna], "On Romances, an Imitation" [Anna], "Seláma, an Imitation of Ossian" [Anna], "Against Inconstancy in our Expectations" [Anna], "The Canal and the Brook, an Apologue," "On Monastic Institutions" [Anna], "On the Pleasure derived from Objects of Terror; with Sir Bertrand, a Fragment" [John; occasionally misattributed to Anna, but see Lucy Aikin's "Memoir" (listed under Biographies and Memoirs, below), I.xiii-xiv], "On the Heroic Poem of Gondibert" [John], "An Enquiry into those kinds of Distress which excite Agreeable Sensations; with a Tale" [Anna]. I have not yet been able to find firm attributions of "On the Province of Comedy" and "The Canal and the Brook."
  • Devotional Pieces, compiled from the Psalms and the Book of Job: to which are prefixed, Thoughts on the Devotional Taste, on Sects, and on Establishments (London: J. Johnson, 1775).
  • Lessons for Children of Two to Three Years Old (London: J. Johnson, 1778).
  • Lessons for Children of Three Years Old (London: J. Johnson, 1778).
  • Lessons for Children from Three to Four Years Old (London: J. Johnson, 1779).
  • Hymns in Prose for Children (London: J. Johnson, 1781). Reprinted, Garland 1977.
  • Lessons for Children, Part Three (London: J. Johnson, 1787).
  • Lessons for Children, Part Four (London: J. Johnson, 1788).
  • An Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (London: J. Johnson, 1790). By "A Dissenter."
  • Civic Sermons to the People (London: J. Johnson, 1792).
  • Remarks on Mr. Gilbert Wakefield's into the Expediency and Propriety of Public or Social Worship (London: J. Johnson, 1792).
  • The Religion of Nature, A Short Discourse, Delivered before the National Assembly at Paris, By Mons. le Curé of ----- on his Resigning the Priesthood. With a Short Address to the Jurymen of Great Britain, by Bob Short. Printed for the Benefit of The Distressed Spital-Field-Weavers, and Sold at Baker's Coffee-house, and by Richardson, Cornhill; Ryal, Lombard-street; Newberry, St. Paul's Church-yard; Bell, in the Strand; Foudrinier, Charing-Cross; and Debrett, Piccadilly. Price 3d. or 2s. a Doz. to give away. [1793].
  • Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation; or, a Discourse for the fast, Appointed on April 19, 1793. By a Volunteer (London: J. Johnson, 1793).
  • Reasons for National Penitence, Recommended for the Fast, appointed February XXVIII, 1794. (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1794). Sometimes attributed to Barbauld.
  • [With John Aikin] Evenings at Home; or, The Juvenile Budget Opened. Consisting of A Variety of Miscellaneous Pieces, for the Instruction and Amusement of Young Persons, 6 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1792-96). Vol. 1, 1792; 2 and 3, 1793; 4, 1794; 5 and 6, 1796. According to Lucy Aikin's "Memoir" (see Biographies and Memoirs, below), of the 99 pieces, 14 are by Barbauld: "The Young Mouse; The Wasp and the Bee; Alfred; Animals and Countries; Canute's Reproof; The Masque of Nature; Things by their Right Names; The Goose and Horse; On Manufactures; The Flying Fish; A Lesson in the Art of Distinguishing; The Phoenix and Dove; The Manufacture of Paper; The Four Sisters. In a new edition will be added, Live Dolls" (Works I.xxxvi).
  • "Letter defending Joseph Priestley from a Satire," Norwich Iris, 24 December 1803.
  • A Legacy for Young Ladies, Consisting of Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Verse (London: Longman, 1826).
  
  

• Individual Works: Editorial, Critical, Biographical

  • The Pleasures of Imagination . . . To which is prefixed a critical essay on the poem by Mrs. Barbauld (London: Cadell and Davies, 1794).
  • The Poetical Works of Mr. William Collins. With a prefatory essay, by Mrs Barbauld (London: Cadell and Davies, 1797).
  • The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson . . . to which are prefixed, a biographical account of that author, and observations on his writing, 6 vols. (London: Richard Phillips, 1804.)
  • Selections from the Spectator, Tatler, Guardian, and Freeholder: with a preliminary essay, 3 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1804).
  • The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside (London: W. Suttaby, 1807).
  • The British Novelists; with an Essay; and Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, by Mrs. Barbauld, 50 vols. (London: F. C. & J. Rivington, 1810)
  • The Female Speaker; or, Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and Verse, Selected from the Best Writers, and Adapted to the Use of Young Women (London: J. Johnson, 1811).
  • John Prior Estlin, Familiar Lectures on Moral Philosophy. With a memoir of the author, by Mrs. Barbauld, 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1818).
  
  

• Correspondence

  • Lucy Aikin, ed., The Works of Anna Lætitia Barbauld, with a Memoir by Lucy Aikin, vol. II (London: Longman, 1825). Letters to Dr. [John] Aikin [Jr.]; Miss E[lizabeth] Belsham, afterwards Mrs. Kenrick; Miss [Judith] Dixon, afterwards Mrs. Beecroft; Mrs. J[ane] Taylor; Miss [Susan] Taylor, now Mrs. Reeve; Mrs. [Sarah] Carr; Mrs. [Frances?] Smith; Dr. [John Prior] and Mrs. [Susannah] Estlin; Mrs. [Eliza] Fletcher; Miss [Eliza or Grace?] F[letcher], and ------- [Maria Edgeworth].
  • Anna Letitia Le Breton, Memoir of Mrs. Barbauld, Including Letters and Notices of Her Family and Friends (London: George Bell, 1874; repr. New York: AMS, 1974).
  • Grace A. Ellis, ed., Memoir, Letters, and a Selection from the Poems and Prose Writings of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, vol. 1 (Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co., 1874).
  • Walter Sidney Scott, ed., Letters of Maria Edgeworth and Anna Letitia Barbauld selected from the Lushington Papers (London: Golden Cockerel Press, 1953).
  • See McCarthy and Kraft, Bibliography, 365-68 for archive and depository holdings of Barbauld's letters.
  
  

• Selected Teaching Editions and Anthologies

  • David Damrosch, gen. ed., The Longman Anthology of British Literature, vol. 2 (New York: Longman, 1999), 29-46. Includes "The Mouse's Petition," "On a Lady's Writing," "Inscriptions for an Ice-House," "To a Little Invisible Being," "To the Poor," "Washing-Day," "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven," "The First Fire," and an excerpt from John Wilson Croker's review of "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven" in The Quarterly Review (June 1812).
  • Anne K. Mellor and Richard E. Matlak, eds., British Literature 1780-1830 (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1996), 165-91. Includes "An Inventory of the Furniture in Dr. Priestley's Study," "On a Lady's Writing," "To a Lady, with Some Painted Flowers," "A Summer Evening's Meditation," Epistle to William Wilberforce, from Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation, from The British Novelists, from "On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing," Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, "A Thought on Death," "To Mr. Barbauld, with a Map of the Land of Matrimony," "The Rights of Woman," "To a Little Invisible Being," "Washing Day," "To Mr. S. T. Coleridge," "The First Fire," and "On the Death of the Princess Charlotte."
  • David Perkins, ed., English Romantic Writers, 2nd ed. (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1995), 29-43. Includes "Washing Day," "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven," "The First Fire," "Octogenary Reflections," "On Education," "On Female Studies."
  • Duncan Wu, ed., Romanticism: An Anthology, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 19-27. Includes "A Summer Evening's Meditation," "Epistle to William Wilberforce," "The Rights of Woman," and "To Mr Coleridge."
  • Roger Lonsdale, ed., Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), 299-311. Includes from "Corsica," "The Mouse's Petition," "Tomorrow," "On the Expected General Rising of the French Nation," "The Rights of Woman," "To the Poor," "To a Little Invisible Being," "Washing-Day," and "To Mr. [S. T.] C[olerid]ge."
  • Paula R. Feldman, ed., British Women Poets of the Romantic Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1997), 51-83. Includes "The Mouse's Petition," "An Inventory of the Furniture in Dr. Priestley's Study," "A Summer Evening's Meditation," "Tomorrow," "Inscription for an Ice-House," "To the Poor," "Washing Day," "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven," "Life," "The Baby-House," and "Riddle ('From rosy bowers we issue forth')"
  • Jennifer Breen, ed., Women Romantic Poets 1785-1832: An Anthology (London: Everyman, 1992), 78-85. Includes "The Rights of Woman," "To the Poor," "To a Little Invisible Being," "Washing Day," and "To Mr [S. T.] C[oleridge]."
  • David Fairer and Christine Gerard, eds., Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 471-85. Includes "Corsica," "A Summer Evening's Meditation," "To Mr Barbauld," "The Rights of Woman," "To a little invisible Being," and "To Mr Coleridge."
  • Robert DeMaria, Jr., ed. British Literature 1640-1789: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 1114-19. Includes "The Mouse's Petition," "Verses Written in an Alcove," and "Washing Day."
  • Duncan Wu, ed., Romantic Women Poets: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 7-18. Includes Eighteen Hundred and Eleven.
  
  

Biographies and Memoirs

• Lucy Aikin, ed., The Works of Anna Lætitia Barbauld, with a Memoir by Lucy Aikin, vol. I (London: Longman, 1825). Vol. I begins with Lucy Aikin's "Memoir," i-lxxi.
• Anna Letitia Le Breton, Memoir of Mrs. Barbauld, Including Letters and Notices of Her Family and Friends (London: George Bell 1874). Reprinted, AMS (New York, 1974).
• Grace A. Ellis, ed., Memoir, Letters, and a Selection from the Poems and Prose Writings of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, vol. 1 (Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co., 1874).
• Jerom Murch, Mrs. Barbauld and her Contemporaries; sketches of some eminent literary and scientific Englishwomen (London: Longmans, 1877).
• Anne Thackeray Ritchie, A Book of Sibyls -- Mrs. Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs. Opie, Miss Austen (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1883).
• Betsy Rodgers, Georgian Chronicle: Mrs Barbauld and Her Family (London: Methuen, 1958).
• Herbert McLachlan, Warrington Academy: Its History and Influence, (Manchester: The Chetham Society, 1943).
• P. O'Brien, Warrington Academy, 1757-86: Its Predecessors and Successors (Wigan: Owl Books, 1989).
• Irene Parker, Dissenting Academies in England: Their Rise and Progress and their Place among the Educational Systems of the Country (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1914).
• Dick Wakefield, Anna Laetitia Barbauld (London: Centaur Press, 2001).

Criticism

• G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992). A highly esteemed work; discusses Barbauld's "Rights of Woman" (pp. 265-66) and "Thoughts on the Devotional Taste, on Sects, and on Establishments" (pp. 273-75).
• George L. Barnet, "'That Cursed Barbauld Crew' or Charles Lamb and Children's Literature," The Charles Lamb Bulletin 25 (Jan. 1979): 1-18. Opposes the didacticism of Barbauld and Aikin's children's literature to the "newly awakened" (p. 4) Romantic spirit of Lamb, Coleridge, and Blake.
• Haley Bordo, "Reinvoking the 'Domestic Muse': Anna Laetitia Barbauld and the Performance of Genre," European Romantic Review 11, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 186-96.
• Penny Bradshaw, "Gendering the Enlightenment: Conflicting Images of Progress in the Poetry of Anna Laetitia Barbauld," Women's Writing 5, no. 3 (1998): 353-71.
• Terry Castle, "Unruly and Unresigned," Times Literary Supplement (10-16 Nov. 1989): 1228. A review of Roger Lonsdale's Eighteenth-Century Women Poets that played an important role in the early discussion of "Washing Day" (see Kraft, Landry, and Messenger).
• David Chandler, "'Mrs. Barbauld's School' and Its Poetic Staff," Notes and Queries 44, no. 2 (June 1997): 225-27.
• David Chandler, "Wordsworth's 'A Night-Piece' and Mrs. Barbauld," Notes and Queries 40, no. 1 (March 1993): 40-41.
• James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998), 114-120. Suggests that "The Uses of History," an essay in A Legacy for Young Ladies, can be read as Barbauld's reply to Croker's charge, in his review of "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven," that "women had no place writing about historical affairs" (p. 115). For Chandler, the essay makes the first connection, necessary for the development of British nationalism, between geography and chronology, a practice theorized in the essay, but performed in "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven."
• Deirdre Coleman, "The Unitarian Rationalist and the 'Winged Spider': Anna Letitia Barbauld and Samuel Taylor Coleridge," in Imperfect Apprehensions: Essays in English Literature in Honour of G. A. Wilkes, ed. Geoffrey Little (Sydney: Challis, 1996).
• Philip Cox, Gender, Genre, and the Romantic Poets: An Introduction (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1996). Chapter One, "Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Anna Laetitia Barbauld: Gender, genre and pastoral" (followed by two chapters on Wordsworth, and then single chapters on Keats, Byron, and Shelley), explores "various permutations of the binary opposition between 'masculine' and 'feminine' as it appears in" Coleridge's "Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement" and Barbauld's "To Mr. C---ge" (p. 22): "Whilst apparently being in a position of authority . . . Barbauld's persona ironically writes herself into a position of subservience" (p. 36).
• Stuart Curran, "Romantic Women Poets: Inscribing the Self," in Women's Poetry in the Enlightenment: The Making of a Canon, 1730-1820, ed. Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999). Describes Barbauld's "Verses on Mrs Rowe" as an assertion of authorial identity, an act of identification with bluestocking Elizabeth Carter and, through her, Elizabeth Rowe: "For a woman to write herself in, to inscribe her identity, she must trans-scribe, write through and write across, the mythicized predecessor as enabling muse" (p. 163).
• Damian Walford Davies, "'A Tongue in Every Star': Wordsworth and Mrs. Barbauld's 'A Summer Evening's Meditation,'" Notes and Queries 43, no. 1 (March 1996): 29-30.
• Margaret Anne Doody, "Sensuousness in the Poetry of Eighteenth-Century Women Poets," in Women's Poetry in the Enlightenment: The Making of a Canon, 1730-1820, ed. Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999). Discusses Barbauld's "The Mouse's Petition" and "The Caterpillar," 21-25.
• Julie Ellison, "The Politics of Fancy in the Age of Sensibility," in Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776-1837, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). For Ellison, "Barbauld's poetry demonstrates the way the motions of fancy can lead both to and away from questions of public policy" (p. 231). The essay focuses on "A Summer Evening's Meditation," "Epistle to William Wilberforce," and "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven" and then compares Barbauld's early poems to Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects (1773).
• Maggie Favretti, "The Politics of Vision: Anna Barbauld's 'Eighteen Hundred and Eleven,'" in Women's Poetry in the Enlightenment: The Making of a Canon, 1730-1820, ed. Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999). Proposes that in "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven" Barbauld opposed what Favretti calls "an already crumbling notion of gentlemanly disinterestedness" (p. 100).
• Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834 (New York: Routledge, 1992). Discusses Barbauld's Hymns in Prose and Epistle to William Wilberforce.
• John Guillory, "Gray's 'Elegy,' Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and the Vernacular Canon," in Early Modern Conceptions of Property, ed. John Brewer and Susan Staves (London: Routledge, 1995). Reads Barbauld's "Warrington Academy" (lines 81-182 of her "The Invitation. To Miss B*****"), printed by William Enfield in The Speaker after Gray's "Elegy," as a revision of Gray's topographical poem: "Barbauld's poem lifts the pastoral scrim from Gray's pretty set, exposing behind the anachronism of its pathos certain facts, the struggle of individuals and social groups to rise" (p. 405).
• William Keach, "A Regency Prophecy and the End of Anna Barbauld's Career," Studies in Romanticism 33, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 569-77. Examines "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven" and its reception. Keach makes the important claim that the poem "marks a decisive break with the meliorist perspective to which [progressive Dissenting ideology] had previously been attached." In this break, Barbauld "reveals her surprising ties with Byron and Percy Shelley and the Regency poetry of national liberation" (pp. 576-77).
• William Keach, "Barbauld, Romanticism, and the Survival of Dissent," Essays and Studies 51 (1998): 62-77.
• Thomas C. Kennedy, "From Anna Barbauld's Hymns in Prose to William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience," Philological Quarterly 77, no. 4 (Fall 1998): 359-76.
• Elizabeth Kraft, "Anna Letitia Barbauld's 'Washing-Day' and the Montgolfier Balloon," Literature and History 4, no. 2 (Autumn 1995): 25-41. An excellent article in which Kraft challenges Castle, Landry, and Messenger, who, according to Kraft, read "'Washing-Day' as the positing of exclusive alternatives: masculine or feminine, privileged class or class, drudgery or creativity. The poem indeed invokes these categories, but it reader who sees the choices" (p. 26).
• Donna Landry, The Muses of Resistance (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990). Stresses Barbauld's perspective as "that of a middle-class child" in "Washing Day," a poem that, for Landry, "pays no attention to class differences across the scene of women's writing" (p. 272).
• William McCarthy, "The Celebrated Academy at Palgrave: A Documentary History of Anna Letitia Barbauld's School," The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual 8 (1997): 279-392.
• William McCarthy, "'We Hoped the Woman Was Going to Appear': Repression, Desire, and Gender in Anna Letitia Barbauld's Early Poems," in Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley (Hanover: Univ. Press of New England, 1995). Counters the long line of readers, "from [William] Woodfall to [Marlon] Ross," who claim that "Barbauld neither writes 'as a woman' nor affirms womanhood in her writing" (p. 114). Foregrounding the strength of desire in Barbauld's early poems, McCarthy posits feminist passion against various versions of patriarchal control.
• William McCarthy, "Mother of All Discourses: Anna Barbauld's Lessons for Children," Princeton University Library Chronicle 60, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 196-219.
• William McCarthy, "A 'High-Minded Christian Lady': The Posthumous Reception of Anna Letitia Barbauld," in Romanticism and Women Poets: Opening the Doors of Reception (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1999).
• Josephine McDonagh, "Barbauld's Domestic Economy," Essays and Studies 51 (1998): 62-77.
• Rod McGillis, "That Great Writer in the English Language," Children's Literature Association Quarterly 13, no. 4 (Winter 1988): 162-164.
• Penny Mahon, "In Sermon and Story: Contrasting Anti-War Rhetoric in the Work of Anna Barbauld and Amelia Opie," Women's Writing 7, no. 1 (2000): 23-28.
• Laura Mandell, Misogynous Economies: The Business of Literature in Eighteenth-Century England (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1999). Addresses the contradictory ways in which misogyny figures into aesthetic evaluations and affective struggles played out in the arena of literature. Chapter 6, "Transcending Misogyny: Anna Letitia Barbauld Writes Her Way Out," argues that Barbauld is able to transcend the misogyny of the emerging discipline of literature by renouncing dominant aesthetic theories used to value literature as canonical.
• Laura Mandell, "'Those Limbs Disjointed of Gigantic Power': Barbauld's Personifications and the (Mis)Attribution of Agency," Studies in Romanticism 37, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 27-41. Discusses "the contradictory potential of personification, first its capacity to mystify (its ideological function), then its use to demystify," reading Barbauld alongside Marx. In addition to Barbauld's polemical pamphlets, the essay focuses on "To a Great Nation" and "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven."
• Anne K. Mellor, "A Criticism of Their Own: Romantic Women Literary Critics," in Questioning Romanticism, ed. John Beer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1995). Suggests "that the leading women literary critics of the Romantic era -- Joanna Baillie, Anna Barbauld, Elizabeth Inchbald, Clara Reeve, Anna Seward, and Mary Wollstonecraft -- upheld an aesthetic theory different from but as coherent as those developed by" the male Romantics (p. 29).
• Anne K. Mellor, "The Female Poet and the Poetess, 1780-1830," Studies in Romanticism 36, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 261-76. Touches on "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven."
• Ann Messenger, His and Hers: Essays in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1986). In chapter seven, "Heroics and Mock Heroics: John Milton, Alexander Pope, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld," Messenger discusses at length "The Groans of the Tankard" (pp. 175-84) and "Washing Day" (pp. 186-93).
• Catherine E. Moore, "'Ladies . . . Taking the Pen in Hand': Mrs. Barbauld's Criticism of Eighteenth-Century Women Novelists," in Fetter'd or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670-1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1986). A discussion of Barbauld's essays and prefaces for the fifty-volume British Novelists (1810): ". . . Barbauld has never received adequate credit for her work as a critic . . . Although her theories . . . were not at all original, they were nowhere else at the time brought together; nor was there a single, extensive, thorough defense of the novel such as hers" (p. 393).
• Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000). Chapters 2, 3, and 4 present "case studies" of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Barbauld, respectively.
• Sam Pickering, "Mrs. Barbauld's Hymns in Prose: 'An Air-Blown Particle' of Romanticism?" Southern Humanities Review 92 (Spring 1975): 259-68.
• Sarah Robbins, "Lessons for Children and Teaching Mothers: Mrs. Barbauld's Primer for the Textual Construction of Middle-Class Domestic Pedagogy," The Lion and the Unicorn 17, no. 2 (Dec. 1993): 135-51.
• Sarah Robbins, "Re-Making Barbauld's Primers: A Case Study in Americanization of British Literary Pedagogy," Children's Literature Association Quarterly 21, no. 4 (Winter 1996-97): 158-69.
• Katharine M. Rogers, "Anna Barbauld's Criticism of Fiction -- Johnsonian Mode, Female Vision," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 21 (1991): 27-41. Although Barbauld's criticism shows a Johnsonian moral concern, ability to fix on significant issues, clarity of analysis, and realistic understanding of human nature, "her voice is distinctively different from Johnson's, and this difference has much to do with her gender" (p. 27). Rogers finds this difference in Barbauld's treatment of "the novel as a subject for serious analysis" (p. 33).
• Susan Rosenbaum, "'A thing unknown, without a name': Anna Laetitia Barbauld and the Illegible Signature," Studies in Romanticism 40, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 369-99.
• Marlon Ross, "Configurations of Feminine Reform: The Woman Writer and the Tradition of Dissent," in Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers 1776-1837, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haeffner (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). In this essay, Barbauld's Dissenting theory of education, which, Ross argues, refuses to separate practical experience, moral conduct, and political action, serves as the context for a reading of "The Mouse's Petition" and "Eighteen Hundred Eleven."
• Marlon Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women's Poetry (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989). Devotes section 4 (pp. 215-29) of Chapter 6, "The Birth of a Tradition: Making Cultural space for Feminine Poetry," to Barbauld, whom Ross discusses in relation to Hannah More: "Despite her republican politics, Barbauld's attitude toward women and literature is similar to More's" (p. 216).
• Diego Saglia, "The Dangers of Over-Refinement: The Language of Luxury in Romantic Poetry by Women, 1793-1811," Studies in Romanticism 38, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 641-672.
• Steven Shankman, "Anna Barbauld, William Collins, and the Rhetoric of the Sublime," Hellas: A Journal of Poetry and the Humanities 7, no. 2 (Fall-Winter 1996): 159-67.
• Lynne Vallone, "'A Humble Spirit under Correction': Tracts, Hymns, and Ideology of Evangelical Fiction for Children, 1780-1820," The Lion and the Unicorn 15, no. 2 (Dec. 1991): 72-95.
• Lisa Vargo, "The Case of Anna Laetitia Barbauld's 'To Mr C(olerid)ge,'" Charles Lamb Bulletin 102 (April 1998): 55-63.
• Daniel E. White, "The 'Joineriana': Anna Barbauld, the Aikin Family Circle, and the Dissenting Public Sphere," Eighteenth-Century Studies 32, no. 4 (Summer 1999): 511-33. Examines "the familial mode of literary production characteristic of the Aikins and the national Dissenting community associated with the . . . Warrington Academy" in order to describe a Dissenting public sphere that asserted "an integral connection between the 'intimate sphere' of the family, the austere virtues of religious nonconformity, and the progressive market ethos of middle-class eighteenth-century life" (p. 511). Focuses on Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and "Thoughts on the Devotional Taste, on Sects, and on Establishments."
• Porter Williams, Jr., "The Influence of Mrs. Barbauld's Hymns in Prose for Children upon Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience," in A Fair Day in the Affections: Literary Essays in Honor of Robert B. White, Jr., ed. Jack D. Durant and M. Thomas Hester (Raleigh: Winston, 1980). Shows that "Blake drew from [Hymns] freely not only for isolated images and phrases but also for some of his important thematic structure" (p. 132). "Readers of Blake," Williams concludes, "should always find Mrs. Barbauld's Hymns to be of interest if only to observe how brilliantly tinsel can be transformed into gold" (p. 144).
• Marilyn L. Williamson, "Who's Afraid of Mrs. Barbauld? The Blue Stockings and Feminism," International Journal of Women's Studies 3, no. 1 (1980): 89-102. An early article that counters what Williamson describes as "inaccurate descriptions of the views and activities of . . . Barbauld and the Blue Stockings" in Lawrence Stone's The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800.
• Carol Shiner Wilson, "Lost Needles, Tangled Threads: Stichery, Domesticity, and the Artistic Enterprise in Barbauld, Edgeworth, Taylor, and Lamb," in Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776-1837, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). Examines the relationships between sewing and literary production: "Needlework in their poems, letters, essays and children's stories confirms, contests, and subtly subverts the domestic ideology that was taking hold in England. Needlework also illuminates issues of class and gender that underlie assumptions about a girl's education . . ." (p. 170).
• Carol Shiner Wilson, "Understanding Cultural Contexts: The Politics of Needlework in Taylor, Barbauld, Lamb, and Wordsworth," in Approaches to British Women Poets of the Romantic Period, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt and Harriet Kramer Linkin (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1997).
• Paul M. Zall, "The Cool World of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Mrs. Barbauld's Crew and the Building of a Mass Reading Class," The Wordsworth Circle 2, no. 3 (Summer 1971): 74-79. Credits Barbauld, Hannah More, and Mrs. Trimmer with "making possible a mass of readers ready for the Lyrical Ballads two years before that revolutionary volume appeared. Thanks are due particularly to Mrs. Barbauld for the fact that they would find its so-called 'experimental' language not at all strange. It was she who was responsible for their learning to read by means of 'the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society'" (p. 78).
• Paul M. Zall, "Wordsworth's 'Ode' & Mrs. Barbauld's Hymns," The Wordsworth Circle 1 (1970): 177-79.

Dissertations

• Sarah Robbins, Domestic Didactics: Nineteen-Century American Pedagogy by Barbauld, Stowe and Addams, Dissertation, University of Michigan, 1993.
• Catherine E. Moore, The Literary Career of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1969.
• Daniel E. White, Religious Dissent and Tempered Dissidence: Community and Publicity in the Early Romantic Period, Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1998.

Electronic Resources

• Lisa Vargo, ed., and Allison Muri, asst. ed. and designer, The Anna Laetitia Barbauld Web Site, http://duke.usask.ca/~vargo/barbauld/
• Lisa Vargo and Allison Muri, eds., Poems (1773) by Anna Laetitia Aikin. A Hypertext Edition, http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/contemps/barbauld/poems1773/
• Molly Beverstein and Laura Mandell, eds. Anna Letitia Barbauld Prose Works, http://www.muohio.edu/womenpoets/barbauld/

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