Anna Laetitia Barbauld gained prominence in the last decades of the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth century as an educator, through her work as a teacher in the school she and her husband ran for eleven years and through her writings for children; as a poet, through her many political, social, and religious poems in which images and themes prepared audiences for the work of William Blake and William Wordsworth; as a writer of forthright, influential social and political tracts; as a literary critic and editor, through her establishment of ethically and artistically demanding, but reasonable, literary standards; and as a literary biographer, through her generally objective, insightful, and knowledgeable treatment of other writers.

Anna Laetitia Aikin, born on 20 June 1743 in the village of Kibworth Harcort, in Leicestershire, was the only daughter of John Aikin and Jane Jennings Aikin. Anna's father, a nonconformist minister...