‘With Mrs Barbauld it is different’: Dissenting Heritage and the Devotional Taste

Abstract

In a letter of August 1804, Anna Barbauld responded to Maria Edgeworth’s announcement that her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, had proposed a plan for a ‘periodical paper, to be written entirely by ladies’.¹ In her response, Barbauld foresaw the problem of division between different groups of women writers: ‘There is no bond of union among literary women, any more than among literary men; different sentiments and different connections separate them much more than the joint interest of their sex would unite them. Mrs. Hannah More would not write along with you or me, and we should probably hesitate at joining Miss Hays, or if she were living, Mrs. Godwin.’² The current reevaluation of Barbauld’s career has led critics to place her among the foremost poets of a revised late-eighteenth-century canon, but Barbauld’s refusal to see gender as the primary determinant of literary or political affinity, as well as her rejection in 1774 of a proposal that she become principal of a Ladies’ College, has confirmed her in the eyes of some as an anti-feminist.³ William McCarthy, on the other hand, has analyzed the ways in which feminist ‘desire takes the form of compensatory fantasy’ in her poetry, thus helpfully critiquing the ‘cardboard antifeminist image of Barbauld’.⁴ By the same token, we need to be careful not to go to the opposite extreme and create a cardboard feminist image of Barbauld. Enlightenment feminism, in fact, in the sense of an active and conscious effort to theorize and realize educational, social, economic, and (to a lesser extent) political equality for women in the modes of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and later Harriet Martineau, was not a central element of Barbauld’s literary work. As an agile thinker and a consistently commanding prose stylist, Barbauld did produce in her religious writings a noteworthy analysis and manipulation of eighteenth-century devotional theory and denominational cultures, elements of which at times involved deep-seated gendered associations.⁵ In this essay, then, I will bracket the question of her feminism and address instead the relations between Barbauld’s devotional thought and her Dissenting heritage, attending, when possible, to the gendered terms of Enlightenment religious history.