Claire Harman
A DISSENTING VOICE
Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment
By William McCarthy (Johns Hopkins University Press 726pp £25)

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If Anna Letitia Barbauld's was a voice of the Enlightenment, it hasn't, until now, carried very far. Known in her own time as a poet and controversial essayist, her fame in the fifty years after her death rested almost entirely on fond memories of her reading schemes for very small children. She struggled through to the twenty-first century with a handful of anthology pieces ('The Mouse's Petition', 'Washing-Day', Eighteen Hundred and Eleven) and a reputation for worthiness: not the stuff to attract a wide readership.

William McCarthy's twenty years of work on this author, which includes co-editorship of a fine Poems and Selected Poems and Prose, has now borne fruit in this monumental, quietly magnificent biography, which will surely do as much to promote Barbauld's reputation as anyone could dream. McCarthy has no extravagant hypotheses or revisionist agenda, just a thoroughness about his subject that does Barbauld the best service, putting her back into context and showing her importance there.

The eldest child of a relentlessly high-minded, low-Church family, Anna Letitia Aikin was a seriously intellectual child, shaped by her 'infallible' father, a Dissenting minister and teacher. She learned Greek and Latin and studied the Stoics, was the star of the Warrington intellectual scene (where one of the family's closest friends was Joseph Priestley), and by her twenties was writing elegant, intelligent occasional verse that drew rave reviews in the London periodicals and overtures from 'The Queen of the Blues', Elizabeth Montagu. In 1779 she was depicted as Clio in a painting of The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain, in company with Hannah More, Charlotte Lennox, Elizabeth Carter and Angelica Kauffmann among others, but on the eve of success among the sisterhood, she married in 1774 a rather unpromising fellow Dissenter, Rochemont Barbauld, and moved with him to a remote Suffolk village to minister to Presbyterians and run a small school.

This was no retreat for Anna, but the life she had been preparing for, where she could work hard and use her considerable writing talent in the service of the great issues of the day. She and her beloved brother John Aikin worked as a team in this regard: John was instrumental in getting her into print in the first place, relied on her as a frequent (anonymous) contributor to the Monthly Magazine after he took over its editorship, and collaborated with her on books and articles. Charles James Fox once congratulated Aikin on an essay 'Against Inconsistency in our Expectations': '"That", replied Aikin, "is my sister's." - "I like much," resumed Fox, "your essay On Monastic Institutions".' "That", answered Aikin, "is also my sister's."'

Even in the age of sensibility, theirs seems to have been a remarkably interdependent bond, and much more sustaining to Anna than her troubled marriage to Rochemont (who suffered from some sort of psychosis and from whom she eventually had to separate). In 1777, John and his wife Martha gave the Barbaulds one of their sons, two-year-old Charles, to adopt. It was a fairly common practice to share children out in this way in families, and clearly Anna Letitia was longing to be a mother, but one can't help thinking (as McCarthy does) that she and her husband didn't wait very long before deciding that they weren't going to have children of their own. It makes one wonder what truth there may have been in a later description of Anna as 'an icicle'.

The advent of little Charles prompted Anna to write the primers that made her (and him) a household name, Lessons for Children. These maternal monologues addressed to a small child revolutionised at a stroke the teaching of reading: 'Come hither, Charles, come to mamma. Make haste. Sit in mamma's lap. Now read your book. Where is the pin to point with? Here is a pin.' One of McCarthy's illustrations is of a pre-Barbauld primer, with its rigid lists of words to be learned. No wonder that the books were treasured and their author became known as 'The Children's Friend'.

Barbauld was also engaged on much more serious works, editing Richardson, and writing literary criticism and many polemical pamphlets. An Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts in 1790 took on the reactionary forces (including Burke) who were determined to keep the Corporation and Test Acts in place; two years later she wrote against the Royal Proclamation against Seditious Writings and Publications. Apart from being pilloried for meddling, Barbauld was (like all vocal Dissenters) accused of being unpatriotic during a period of national emergency. She was never very good at anticipating criticism of her works (the younger Romantics in particular proved very antagonistic), though that never stopped her picking up the pen when she saw some needful cause.

Barbauld was surprised to find herself among Mary Wollstonecraft's list of misogynists and has remained unappealing to feminists ever since. McCarthy can't make her over into a sister, but in the course of this long perusal of her life's work makes it abundantly clear that Barbauld was no gender traitor and that her views on separate education implied no devaluing of girls. His brilliant elucidation of the Dissenting mindset - which Anna personified - shows how 'core values' become utterly subversive in a time of national crisis. He also shows, more clearly than in any other book I've read, how the perpetual wartime of 1793-1815 provoked a 'chronic illness of the intellectual left' which the Romantic movement did nothing to heal.

'She was a woman of much deeper feeling than the world imagined,' one friend of Anna Barbauld said. She was also a woman of extraordinary sense, writing at the height of invasion fever in 1803, 'I am sure we do not believe in the danger we pretend to believe in; and I am sure that none of us can even form an idea how we should feel if we were forced to believe it.' Against the grain of her own times and against ours, that likes its Regency women glamorous and scandalous, Anna Letitia Barbauld emerges as a sort of intellectual heroine. I feel I'll be coming back to this wonderful book for many years to come.

Claire Harman's most recent book is 'Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World' (Canongate).