Louisa Baldwin's early and sustained connection to the Pre-Raphaelite circle and her role as the mother of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and the aunt of Rudyard Kipling ensure Baldwin a position of interest to literary critics and historians today. Her novels, stories, and poems give her a more tenuous hold on fame, although they will continue to claim the attention of literary and cultural historians. Her works, many of them for children, include strokes of imagination, inspiration, and technical proficiency, but they also embody heavy-handed moralism, coincidence-riddled plots, wrenched poetic lines, and clichéd figurative language. A third of her poems treat religious subjects less likely to interest modern readers than they did her contemporaries. As a whole, however, her works offer useful insight into the social issues of her day, especially the interaction among social classes and the treatment and roles of women.

Baldwin and three...