Author Background

Anna Laetitia Aikin Barbauld  (1743-1825) was born into a family of Presbyterian Dissenters. Her father, John Aikin, a schoolteacher and minister, took the unusual step of educating his daughter while she was still in her infancy. In addition to learning to read and write in English—not a given for women at this time—Barbauld learned French, Italian, Latin, and Greek. Joseph Priestley, poet, Dissenter theologian, and friend of the family, helped inspire Barbauld to write poetry.

Early Writings

Barbauld privately circulated her poems. Like many women authors, she first published her poetry under the auspices of a male relative, in her case, in her brother John’s Essays on SongWriting (1771), which included several of her poems. William Enfield, who had published comments on Joseph Priestley’s attacks on the Church of England, also included several of Barbauld’s hymns in his Hymns for Public Worship (1772). In 1773, she published poems under her own name, a radical act at that time, and was met with remarkable success.

Educational Influence

In 1774, she married Rochemont Barbauld, a Presbyterian Dissenter convert. They opened a boarding school in Suffolk and adopted children. She herself taught at Palgrave Academy in subjects that included geography and science. Her early work focused on educating children, and education remained a strong purpose throughout her writing career in both original and edited work, including Lessons for Children (1778-79) and Female Speaker (1811), an anthology of prose and poetry for young women. Her multivolume edition of The British Novelists (1810) curated the novel genre, canonizing and giving weight to the form for future generations. Its introduction evaluated constituent elements of the novel genre, particularly plot and narrative closure.

Themes of Activism

Her “evaluation” of society—particularly of its injustices, inequalities of class, race and gender, and atrocities—shaped much of her poetry and prose. In “An Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts” (1790), she condemned religious oppression in England in an emotionally-charged and cogent argument. She prophesied the corruption and decline of a nation that failed to abolish the abhorrent slave trade in her “Epistle to William Wilberforce Esq. On the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade” (1791), and she vilified the English war against the French in “Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation” (1793).

“The Rights of Women”

Written by Anna Laetitia Barbauld

Copyright: Public Domain

Yes, injured Woman! rise, assert thy right!
Woman! too long degraded, scorned, opprest;
O born to rule in partial Law’s despite,
Resume thy native empire o’er the breast!
Go forth arrayed in panoply divine;
That angel pureness which admits no stain;
Go, bid proud Man his boasted rule resign,
And kiss the golden sceptre of thy reign.
Go, gird thyself with grace; collect thy store
Of bright artillery glancing from afar;
Soft melting tones thy thundering cannon’s roar,
Blushes and fears thy magazine of war.
Thy rights are empire: urge no meaner claim,—
Felt, not defined, and if debated, lost;
Like sacred mysteries, which withheld from fame,
Shunning discussion, are revered the most.
Try all that wit and art suggest to bend
Of thy imperial foe the stubborn knee;
Make treacherous Man thy subject, not thy friend;
Thou mayst command, but never canst be free.
Awe the licentious, and restrain the rude;
Soften the sullen, clear the cloudy brow:
Be, more than princes’ gifts, thy favours sued;—
She hazards all, who will the least allow.
But hope not, courted idol of mankind,
On this proud eminence secure to stay;
Subduing and subdued, thou soon shalt find
Thy coldness soften, and thy pride give way.
Then, then, abandon each ambitious thought,
Conquest or rule thy heart shall feebly move,
In Nature’s school, by her soft maxims taught,
That separate rights are lost in mutual love.

Sources

Barbauld, Anna Laetitia. “The Rights of Women.”  Public Domain.

Robinson, Bonnie J.  British Literature II: Romantic Era to the Twentieth Century and Beyond.  University of North Georgia Press, 2018,  https://oer.galileo.usg.edu/english-textbooks/16/, CCA-SA 4.0