Barbauld

Barbauld, ANNA LETITIA, an English authoress, was born in 1743, at Kibworth-Harcourt, Leicestershire, where her father, the Rev. John Aikin, D.D., a dissenter, kept an academy. Her private education, the religious influence of her home, and her secluded life in the country, were well fitted to develop early her natural taste for poetry; but it was not until 1773 that she published her Poems, which ran through four editions in the twelvemonth. Encouraged by this, she the same year, conjointly with her brother, John Aikin (q.v.), published Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose. Next year she married the Rev. Rochmont Barbauld, a dissenting minister at Palgrave, Suffolk, in which village the newly married pair opened a boys' boarding-school, which was soon made celebrated by Mrs Barbauld's literary fame and assiduity. During the ten years spent here she published Early Lessons for Children, her best work; Hymns in Prose, and Devotional Pieces. In 1792 she commenced with the same brother the well-known series, Evenings at Home. In 1810 she published a collection of the British novelists, the task of editing which she had undertaken to divert her mind from the suicide of her husband two years before. Her last poetical effort was an ode, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, in which she anticipated Macaulay's New Zealander. All her compositions are characterised by an old-world grace, an easy, flowing style, pure and elevated sentiment, and give token of a mind well versed in classical literature. She died at Stoke-Newington, 9th March 1825. See the Memoir by Lucy Aikin, prefixed to the collection of the Works of A. L. Barbauld (2 vols. 1825); the Lives by Mrs Le Breton (1874) and Grace Ellis (Boston, U.S. 1874); and Miss Thackeray's Book of Sibyls (1883).