Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment (review)

Many would consider a full-scale study of the life of Anna Barbauld rendered impossible through a single catastrophe: on 25 September 1940 an incendiary bomb dropped on the Lincoln's Inn home of her great-great-great-nephew Charles William Brodribb and destroyed much of a collection of family papers, including Barbauld's correspondence. In spite of this loss, William McCarthy's biography is a tour de force; it reflects twenty years of researching and writing about a deeply interesting and still underrated figure whose life and work have been "dug out of a mudslide of oblivion" (xiii) and recovered from Victorian and family hagiography. McCarthy's point of departure is his conviction that her literary career represents a voice of the Enlightenment for the range and subjects in which she worked. Her writings convey a middle-class liberalism that champions principles of human rights, political equity, and respect that resonate today.

McCarthy's challenge was to determine how best to write a life where many of the essential documents are missing. The strategies adopted here are honest, wise, original, and effective. McCarthy confronts the issue that any biography is necessarily "a researched fiction, the imagining of a character and story by inferences from previous documents" (xix), and he does not let the reader lose sight of this matter. A signal of the need to rely on the speculative is the insertion, between the preface and the first chapter, of a brief episode, "March 1790," that imagines the writing of "An Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts" and sets up many of the concerns and methods of the biography. When he later returns to discuss this period, in which Barbauld breaks a silence of eight years and writes a series of political pamphlets that engage with reform and the French Revolution, including "Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation," he notes that only ten of Barbauld's letters survive from this crucial time. McCarthy works diligently here and throughout in the absence of documentary evidence to situate her private life within her family and intellectual circle and within her times. In the name of what is missing, McCarthy has to use the speculative "mights" and "coulds" and "woulds" to indicate where he must infer. In the earlier sections he makes use of contemporary documents concerning other women who belonged to the middle class to make inferences about Barbauld's experiences. He reads Barbauld's writings with the acute eye of a biographer, as much as that of a literary critic. The presence of the first person in the text does not seem intrusive, but again serves as a register that McCarthy is aware that he must make clear he is drawing on a less complete record than he would wish. The volume is worth reading for the very methods through which he has made so much of his subject.

By and large the approach taken here is a traditional literary-historical one; for all the successful creative interventions, McCarthy makes clear that he is not a fan of literary theory. Yet his sensibility in approaching his subject is modern. In his discussion of Barbauld's controversial marriage to Rochemont Barbauld he speculates about their childlessness, and when he cannot speak definitively about other cruxes in Barbauld's life, he goes a long way to contextualize and make sense of them: for example, her refusal to participate in a plan for a women's academy, her response to the negative reviews of "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven," and the animosity she received from younger male writers such as Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Lamb.

McCarthy sheds light on Barbauld's relations with her mother, offering more sympathy for the mother's position and what she gave her daughter than has been suggested hitherto. Her family helped perpetuate the idea that she was an unwilling author; McCarthy considers such gender-related issues, including that of Barbauld's misunderstood feminism, judiciously. He convincingly situates...