Biography

Le Breton, Anna Laetitia. Memoir of Mrs. Barbauld Including Letters and Notices of Her Family and Friends. London: Bell, 1874, 236 p.

An account of Barbauld's life written by her grand-niece and including the texts of several of her poems and letters.

Oliver, Grace A. The Story of the Life of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, with Many of Her Letters. Boston: Cupples, Upham & Co., 1874.

Biography based on Barbauld's correspondence and accounts by her contemporaries.

Rodgers, Betsey. Georgian Chronicle: Mrs. Barbauld and Her Family. London: Methuen, 1958, 298 p.

Traces the history of Barbauld's family from the late seventeenth century through the mid-nineteenth century; includes bibliography and previously unpublished correspondence.

Criticism

"A Forgotten Children's Book." The Hibbert Journal 63, No. 298 (Autumn 1964): 27-34.

Discusses the publication history and contents of Barbauld's Hymns in Prose for Children; includes several facsimile pages.

McCarthy, William, and Elizabeth Kraft. Introduction to The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, pp. xxi-xlii. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994.

Reviews Barbauld's poetic works as well as contemporary and subsequent critical reception of her poetry.

Mishra, Vijay. "Gothic Fragments and Fragmented Gothics." In The Gothic Sublime, pp. 83-116. Albany: State University of New York, 1994.

Defines the "Gothic fragment" as a distinct genre within the Gothic, taking Barbauld's "Sir Bertrand, A Fragment" as its archetypical text.

Rogers, Katharine M. "Anna Barbauld's Criticism of Fiction—Johnsonian Mode, Female Vision." Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 21 (1991): 27-41.

Compares Barbauld's and Samuel Johnson's evaluations of the novel as a genre, paying particular attention to Barbauld's interest in woman readers and writers.

Ross, Marlon B. "The Birth of a Tradition: Making Cultural Space for Feminine Poetry." In The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Woman's Poetry, pp. 187-231. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Relates Barbauld's politics to the style and content of her poetry and to her attitudes towards her own writing.

Williams, Porter, Jr. 'The Influence of Mrs. Barbauld's Hymns in Prose for Children upon Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience." In A Fair Day in the Affections: Literary Essays in Honor of Robert B. White, Jr., edited by Jack D. Durant and M. Thomas Hester, pp. 131-46. Raleigh, N.C.: Winston Press, 1980.

Argues that Barbauld's Hymns exercised a small but significant influence on the style, imagery, and thematic structure of Songs of Innocence.

Zall, Paul M. "Wordsworth's 'Ode' and Mrs. Barbauld's Hymns" The Wordsworth Circle 1, No. 4 (Autumn 1970): 177-79.

Presents evidence that Barbauld's Hymns in Prose for Children influenced Wordsworth's poetic expression.

——. "The Cool World of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Mrs. Barbauld's Crew and the Building of a Mass Reading Class." The Wordsworth Circle 2, No. 3 (Summer 1971): 74-9.

Considers the contribution of Barbauld and other contemporary women writers for children to the spread of literacy in the late eighteenth century.

Additional coverage of Barbauld's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Gale Research: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 107, 109, 142.