“…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…”
Read the entirety of A Dissenting Voice, Claire Harman’s review of Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment by William McCarthy at Literary Review
