Anna Letitia Barbauld (née Aikin) (1743-1825), Poet and writer

Sitter in 6 portraits
A leading early Romantic writer, Barbauld's first publication, Poems (1773), was a popular and critical success. In 1774, she married Rochemont Barbauld, and the couple established a boarding school in Suffolk. Starting in her brother John Aikin's Monthly Magazine, Barbauld began contributing to periodicals and taking commissions from booksellers. She wrote for the Annual Review (1803-9), edited by her nephew Arthur Aikin, and provided prefaces to editions of Mark Akenside (1794) and William Collins (1797). Her most ambitious work was the poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812), a pessimistic view of the existing state and future prospects of Britain.