Anna Laetita Barbauld, eighteenth-century polymath, two-hundred years on

York Georgian Society Lecture

Anna Laetita Barbauld (1743-1825) was a poet, educator and polemicist, and one of the leading British authors of the late eighteenth century. She was celebrated after her death as ‘unquestionably the first of our female poets, and one of the most eloquent and powerful of our prose writers’. Marking the 200th anniversary of her death, this lecture will investigate Barbauld’s rich and varied literary career, the critical backlash that she faced in her life and after her death, and her connections with the Dissenting protestant communities of Yorkshire and York.

Biography:
Mary Fairclough is Professor in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. Her work investigates the intersection of literature, science, politics and religion in the eighteenth century and Romantic period. She is the author of The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy, and Print Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Literature, Electricity and Politics: ‘Electrick Communication Every Where’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). A book currently in progress – supported by the Leverhulme Trust – is on Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Mary Hays, reading, and devotion.

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Image: ‘Anna Letitia Barbauld (née Aiken)’, published 1798 by John Chapman (active 1792-1823), after an unknown artist, Stipple engraving on paper; NPG D4457 © The National Portrait Gallery

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