Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre

Biographies of the Poets

Biographies of the Poets Writing these lives has been revealing and humbling. Not only is there disagreement about the birth, baptism, or death dates of some of these women but these and other basic facts about a few, including poets whom readers of this manuscript recognized as excellent, have eluded such supersleuths as Roger Lonsdale and Isobel Grundy. The publication of the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) came at a fortuitous time, and I used the dates given there unless I knew more scholarly evidence; however, even in that great work some women in my book are omitted. These sketches are intended to be a brief introduction to the women and should be supplemented by biographical and reception-history information in the text. In addition to the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, my sources for these sketches were Joyce Fullard’s British Women Poets, 1660–1800, Victoria Blain, Isobel Grundy, and Patricia Clements’s Feminist Companion to Literature in English, Roger Lonsdale’s Eighteenth-Century Women Poets, Janet Todd’s Dictionary of British and American Women Writers, 1660–1800, Paul Schlueter and June Schlueter’s Encyclopedia of British Women Writers, prefaces to the women’s poetry, the Orlando Project, and sources cited in discussions of their poetry. I am especially indebted to Roger Lonsdale’s impressive research into the lives of these women. baillie, joanna (1762–1851). Baillie moved from Glasgow, where she had been educated at a good boarding school, to London in 1784, after the death of her father, a professor of divinity at the University of Glasgow. In London her mother’s famous brother, John Hunter, and his wife, the poet Anne, opened a distinguished intellectual society to her. A member of the Church of Scotland, she became part of Rochemont Barbauld’s congregation in Hampstead. In 1790 she published Poems anonymously (identified by Roger Lonsdale in 1984 as different from Fugitive Verses) and became one of the best-known women writers of the day with her Plays on the Passions. John Philip Kemble and Sara Siddons starred in the Drury Lane production of De Monfort (1800). Baillie continued to write poetry and became a popular composer of songs and ballads, many of them Scottish in derivation. bannerman, anne (1765–1829). An Edinburgh woman, Bannerman came to Robert Anderson’s attention when she published two sonnets and a translation of Rousseau’s fifteenth ode in the Edinburgh Magazine. Her poems include translations from Italian as well. An acquaintance, Sydney Smith, a founder of the Edinburgh Review, described her as a ‘‘crooked poetess’’ because of a physical deformity. Bannerman published Poems By Anne Bannerman in 1800 and, with the help of Anderson and his contacts, Tales of Superstition and Chivalry (1802), which is considered her most important work today. Impoverishment 404 Biographies of the Poets unrelieved by a subscription, revised edition of Poems (1807) led to her becoming a governess in Exeter and, as far as we know, ended her publishing career. barbauld, anna laetitia aikin (1743–1825). The very well educated daughter of a Nonconformist minister in Warrington, Lancashire, Barbauld knew five languages, including Greek and Latin, and worked much of her life as a teacher. She published her first volume of poems in 1773 and, with her brother John, Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose in the same year. In 1774 she married Rochemont Barbauld, who later became unstable and finally committed suicide. She was one of the most prolific writers and editors of her time and, in addition to poetry, wrote political and pedagogical tracts and was an important author of children’s literature. Among her projects were editing Samuel Richardson’s correspondence and the fifty-volume British Novelists. barber, mary (1690?–1757). Barber was the wife of an English woolen draper in Dublin and the mother of four children. Jonathan Swift described her as ‘‘wholly turn’d to Poetry’’ and Ireland’s ‘‘chief poetess.’’ She had published several poems before she met Swift, including a progress of poetry and strongly worded appeals on behalf of a military officer’s widow. Poverty drove her to England, and she lived in Bath intermittently. Her Poems on Several Occasions (1734) was published by subscription. Rheumatism and gout crippled her hands and feet, and she appears to have given up writing. She died in Ireland, to which she had returned in the early 1740s. blamire, susanna (1747–1794). ‘‘The Muse of Cumberland’’ was reared and educated after her mother’s death by her wealthy...