The Collected Works of Anna Letitia Barbauld: Volume 4: Essays and Discourses

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.

Scott Krawczyk, Professor of English and Associate Chief Academic Officer, University of the District of Columbia, William McCarthy, Professor Emeritus of English, Iowa State University, Lisa Vargo, Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of Saskatchewan

Scott Krawczyk is a retired army officer and former Head of the Department of English and Philosophy at West Point, where he served in leadership roles and taught courses in composition, literature, and cultural studies for over 13 years. He led several of West Point’s key humanities programs, founded its Writing Center, and developed the annual Zengerle Family Lecture in Arts and Humanities. After retiring from the military, Professor Krawczyk became a lecturer at the Georgetown School of Continuing Studies, served as Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Long Island University (Brooklyn), and later joined Georgetown’s MA program in Engaged and Public Humanities as an affiliate faculty member. In 2020 he was appointed Associate Chief Academic Officer at the University of the District of Columbia.

William McCarthy retired as Professor of English at Iowa State University in 1997. He has published articles on Milton and Samuel Johnson but has devoted most of his scholarly effort to British women writers of the eighteenth century. He is recognized today as the foremost authority on the life and work of Anna Letitia Barbauld, whose place in English literature he is re-establishing with the first complete edition of her writings.

Lisa Vargo is Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada. She researches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, with a focus on Mary Shelley and Anna Barbauld. She has published on Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Robinson, Anna Barbauld, Mary Shelley, Anna Jameson, hypertext editing, gothic fiction, eighteenth-century representations of the moose, Charlotte Smith, and Mathilde Blind. She is the editor of Mary Shelley’s Lodore and Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey (Broadview Press). Her edition of Mary Shelley’s Spanish and Portuguese Lives appears in Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings from Pickering and Chatto.