Of all the “female Jacobins” who entered the late-eighteenth-century literary fray, the poet Anna Letitia Barbauld (née Aikin, 1743–1825) may be the most difficult to place. Although this ardent radical and committed Dissenter minced no words in promoting abolitionism, religious toleration, and “revolution principles,” she remained reticent on the subject of women's rights and disliked being lumped with Catharine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and the other “viragos” of her age. As Barbauld instructed women in one of her early poems, “Your best, your sweetest empire, is—to please,” a theme elaborated on in her “The Rights of Woman” (1790). Such demurrals may have won this celebrated author a wider audience in Georgian Britain, but they have curried less favor with contemporary audiences. “Why,” queries Barbara Taylor in Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge, 2003), “did such a vigorous radicalism falter when it came to her own sex?” (184).

Yet this woman of many hats harbored more complex sentiments regarding female emancipation than her comments—or those of subsequent interpreters—would suggest. Indeed, it is one of the great pleasures of William McCarthy's erudite and extensive biography to rescue Barbauld from the condescension, or perhaps in this case, confusion, of posterity. As McCarthy painstakingly demonstrates, in a work as much committed to probing Barbauld's posthumous reception as to documenting her life, Barbauld's “antifeminist” image was cultivated less by the author herself than by her niece Lucy Aikin, who was eager to bring her aunt's sometimes extremist views more in line with Victorian tastes. In her “Memoir” of Barbauld, published in 1825, Aikin gave a “conservative spin to [her aunt’s] views on women,” most notably by including a letter, taken out of context, in which Barbauld seemed to reject an invitation to head an academy for young women (xvi). As McCarthy shows, however, the letter is misleading. Intended as a private correspondence with her husband, Barbauld was not opposed to female education, per se, but rather “recoil[ed] from the idea of having to form genteel young ladies because she [felt] that she [was] not one and fear[ed] being ridiculed for pretending” (142).

To focus on McCarthy's excavation of Barbauld's feminist worldviews, though, is not to suggest this as the sole or even primary emphasis of his weighty tome, the product of roughly twenty years worth of research on this subject. McCarthy's “principal aim,” rather, is to provide a comprehensive accounting of Barbauld's life and work, a goal that McCarthy sees as imperative given both the vagaries of historical memory and the limitations imposed by Barbauld's own fragmented archive (xviii). This commitment to comprehensiveness leads McCarthy into detailed discussion of virtually every aspect of Barbauld's life. Over the course of twenty-two chapters, McCarthy moves from consideration of Barbauld's early childhood under the watchful eye of her mother, Jane Aikin, and father, the Reverend John Aikin, a preeminent even if “self-effacing” minister and educator, whose pupils at Kibworth and Warrington provided Barbauld with her earliest society; to discussion of her evolution as a poet and critic, and stormy marriage to the “eccentric” Rochemont Barbauld, with whom she ran a successful boys’ school at Palgrave that “became known as a nursery of radical principles” (184); to treatment of her mature years in Hampstead and Stoke Newington, where Barbauld weighed in on some of the most pressing issues of the Revolutionary period, and dabbled in literary criticism, while simultaneously trying to manage her unraveling marriage. Throughout, McCarthy intersperses his narrative with several close readings of Barbauld's essays, lectures, lessons, and poems, including an especially moving interpretation of her poem “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven” (1812), a withering critique of British “progress” during the Napoleonic Wars.

This steady accumulation of detail rewards the patient reader. One leaves this biography with an intimate sense not just of how Barbauld navigated her particular worlds but also of how her interventions shaped individuals and movements in Britain and overseas. Barbauld's “Thoughts on the Devotional Taste” (1775), for example, an essay published relatively early in her prolific career, offered a direct challenge to the dissenting establishment by insisting on the centrality of emotion in religious experience. The essays and poems that Barbauld published during the 1790s, meanwhile, helped define the most pressing problems and preoccupations of this stormy decade and paved new paths forward for women in the public sphere. Nor should we forget Barbauld's significant innovations in pedagogy; she diverged from conventional educational practices by promoting “active problem solving” and placing a premium on the “why of the information, its constructedness, and its limits” (503). This pedagogical reorientation, McCarthy suggests, had a profound impact on Barbauld's own students and on all children who encountered her Lessons for Children and Hymns in Prose for Children, texts that remained in wide circulation on both sides of the Atlantic through the late nineteenth century, despite criticisms leveled against them by the Romantics. Barbauld, then, is a “voice of the Enlightenment” both in the sense that her positions were, as McCarthy repeatedly insists, eminently reasonable and in that she placed her stamp on such a diverse range of Enlightenment initiatives.

This being said, I should note that the very gifts of this biography are also to some extent its liabilities. In the quest for comprehensiveness, McCarthy is at times too reluctant to shape his material or to adopt a clear perspective. All but the most devoted Barbauld aficionados, for example, may care what the poetess ate while on holiday in Tunbridge (420). The premium that McCarthy places on recovery also makes him unwilling to engage fully with relevant secondary literature or to position his findings in relation to broader historiographical debates. As McCarthy himself readily concedes, “I have not devoted space to noticing current commentary on [Barbauld] or to theorizing my interpretive moves” (xix). For McCarthy, this refusal to “notice” may be liberating. But it will likely frustrate those scholars eager to situate this stimulating work within the broader (and burgeoning) conversations about gender and Enlightenment in the Revolutionary era.