Periodicals and Middle-Class Dissent: Anna Letitia Barbauld and Elizabeth Moody at the Monthly Review

Abstract

The preceding chapter demonstrates the professionalism of both Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays and situates them in a lively and supportive community that encouraged their intellectual development and offered them opportunities to turn writing into a source of much needed financial support. Anna Letitia Barbauld too seems to have felt the pinched circumstances that plagued the English middle classes, especially during the inflationary war years of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although by this time women frequently turned to writing to supplement their incomes, criticism for a well known literary review remained by and large the province of men. Barbauld enjoyed an early ascent to literary fame, but like Wollstonecraft, she worked for a time as an educator before turning to writing for her income. And for Barbauld, too, literary criticism proved crucial. For Wollstonecraft, however, criticism became not merely a reliable source of financial support. Rather, it brought her into the literary marketplace in ways unprecedented for a woman. Similarly, while the earnings criticism offered were surely most welcome, Barbauld too found more than just income in writing criticism.