Collected Works of Anna Letitia Barbauld – serie

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 Anglo­American culture for over a century. Her poems influenced Coleridge and Wordsworth; her writings on education, church­state 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 III, Literary Criticism, brings together her considerable body of work in literary criticism, from her early essays on the poets Mark Akenside and William Collins to her canon­making introductions to the 50-volume edition of British Novelists issued by the publishing house of Longman. Barbauld also edited and introduced the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson in an edition which may very well be responsible for a young Jane Austen's enthusiastic reading of Richardson's work and her own foray into the writing of novels. Also included in this volume is the preliminary essay Barbauld wrote to preface the edition of Selections from the Spectator, Tatler, Guardian, and Freeholder published by Joseph Johnson. Like her short, unsigned reviews for the Monthly Review, the introductory essays were addressed to a growing middle-class readership and served to elevate the taste of the reading public. Barbauld's critical work served as a model for women writers of the next generations. George Eliot and Virginia Woolf would also write anonymous reviews for the magazines, thus honing their own skills and continuing to encourage the refinement of literary taste and production. Barbauld's love of literature fueled her critical analyses, and her essays speak to the love of reading as much as they provide critique of the works under consideration. Her concern is always for the common reader who seeks in books both instruction and pleasure.

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 I presents all of Anna Letitia Barbauld's known poems, drawing on manuscript and printed sources that were not known in 1994, when the last standard edition of Barbauld's poems was published. William McCarthy's critical edition adds new poems to Barbauld's canon, and removes several found to be doubtful. It takes into account the surprising number of early American texts. It revisits the question of copy-texts and makes different choices of them. It re-dates several poems and corrects and supplements annotations. It notices reprints, which played a major role in creating Barbauld's after-image on both shores of the Atlantic. The Poems, Revised, is the new standard edition today, indispensable for all students of Barbauld's work.

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.