The Collected Works Of Anna Letitia Barbauld Volume 4

This volume presents together with contextualizing headnotes and annotations all of Anna Letitia Barbauld's known essays, political writings, and discourses. Thirty essays featured in this collection from The Monthly Magazine and The Athenaeum are attributed to Barbauld for the first time.

V. 1. Memoir. Poems -- v. 2. Correspondence. Miscellaneous pieces.

A two-volume edition of some of Anna Laetitia Barbauld's poems and prose works, published soon after her death in 1825.

Published originally in 1809-1810, The Friend was revised in 1812, by public demand. In 1818, a three-volume rifacimento appeared in which Coleridge attempted to dispel obscurity, tie up loose threads of reasoning, and provide more mature apercus. Now, in the Collected Works, The Friend has been re-edited to return to Coleridge's 1818 text. His emendations, cuts, and marginal comments noted in six copies of the work, as well as manuscript additions and deletions, have been included as footnotes. The editor’s footnotes also elucidate sources and themes and provide translations of the many Latin and Greek passages. The entire periodical Friend is given as an appendix, with the 1812 revisions. Originally published in 1969. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This volume brings together for the first time all the known poems of English writer Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743-1825), a once esteemed but long neglected figure whose career spanned the Age of Sensibility and the Romantic Era. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft have collected 170 of her poems, including twenty-three previously unpublished and eleven conjectural attributions. This is the first scholarly edition of any writings of Barbauld, a brilliant woman whose interests ranged from literary criticism to history and affairs of state to children’s stories. At the end of the eighteenth century, Barbauld may well have been the most eminent living poet, male or female, in Britain. Barbauld belongs almost equally to two generations. Her verse displays an eighteenth-century adherence to balance, common sense, and poetic diction and meter, but it also celebrates the individual, the passionate, and the fanciful in a clearly Romantic manner. In the current reconfiguring of Romanticism, Barbauld provides an important contrast to the major male poets who have, until recently, defined the era--poets who clearly acknowledged her influence on their own work, yet who played a role in Barbauld’s lapse into obscurity in the century after her death. Coleridge, before a serious falling out with Barbauld, admired her greatly, and Wordsworth confessed that he wished the final eight lines of her poem “Life” had been of his own composing. Walter Savage Landor ranked her “Summer Evening’s Meditation” among the finest poems in the English language. Barbauld’s poems have retained their capacity to delight readers; they are witty, learned, imaginative, and unpredictable in both choice and treatment of subject. Read as a whole, this collection reveals a striking variety of style and voice and provides the basis for a major--and long overdue--reevaluation of Barbauld’s poetry. McCarthy and Kraft present unmodernized texts of the poems that reflect as nearly as possible the author’s final intention and give variant readings in textual notes. A lengthy introduction includes a discussion of the poems, a history of their composition and publication, and an outline of Barbauld’s life and writing career.