Portal:Children's literature/Selected biography/May2007

Anna Laetitia Barbauld (June 20, 1743&mdash;March 9, 1825) was a prominent eighteenth-century British poet, essayist, and children's author.

As a "woman of letters" who published successfully in multiple genres, Barbauld had a significant effect on many aspects of her society. As a teacher at the celebrated Palgrave Academy and a children's writer, Barbauld also had a significant effect on education. Her famous primers provided a model for "infant pedagogy" for more than a century. Her essays demonstrated that it was possible for women to be publicly engaged in politics, and she herself provided a model of the female writer for contemporary women to emulate. Even more importantly, her poetry was foundational to the development of literary Romanticism in England. Barbauld was also a literary critic; her anthology of eighteenth-century British novels helped to establish the canon as we know it today. (more...)