Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743–1825) was a prominent eighteenth-century
English poet, essayist, and children's author. A "woman of letters" who
published in multiple genres, Barbauld had a successful writing career
at a time when female professional writers were rare. She was a noted
teacher at the celebrated Palgrave Academy and an innovative children's
writer; her famous primers provided a model for pedagogy for more than
a century. Her essays demonstrated that it was possible for a woman to
be publicly engaged in politics, and other women authors emulated her.
Even more importantly, her poetry was foundational to the development
of Romanticism in England. Barbauld was also a literary critic, and her
anthology of eighteenth-century British novels helped establish the
canon as we know it today. Barbauld's literary career ended abruptly in
1812 with the publication of her poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven,
which criticized Britain's participation in the Napoleonic Wars. The
vicious reviews shocked Barbauld and she published nothing else within
her lifetime. Her reputation was further damaged when many of the
Romantic poets she had inspired in the heyday of the French Revolution
turned against her in their later, more conservative, years. Barbauld
was remembered only as a pedantic children's writer during the
nineteenth century, and largely forgotten during the twentieth century,
but the rise of feminist literary criticism in the 1980s renewed
interest in her works and restored her place in literary history.
Read the rest of this article:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Laetitia_Barbauld>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1768:
Philip Astley staged the first modern circus in London.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/circus>
1839:
The French Academy of Sciences announced the Daguerreotype photographic
process, named after its inventor, French artist and chemist Louis
Daguerre.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daguerreotype>
1861:
The civilian ship Star of the West was fired upon as it attempted to
send supplies and reinforcements to Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor
before the American Civil War.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_of_the_West>
1916:
World War I: The last British troops evacuated from Gallipoli, as the
Ottoman Empire prevailed over of a joint British and French operation
to capture Istanbul at the Battle of Gallipoli.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallipoli_Campaign>
1923:
The autogyro , a type of rotorcraft invented by civil engineer and
pilot Juan de la Cierva, made its first successful flight at Cuatro
Vientos Airfield in Madrid, Spain.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/autogyro>
2005:
Mahmoud Abbas was elected President of the Palestinian National
Authority to replace Yasser Arafat, who died in 2004.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_presidential_election%2C_2005>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
in the swim (adj):
(idiomatic) Actively participating in the flow of events; very involved
<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/in_the_swim>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love
for truth — and truth rewarded me.
--Simone de Beauvoir
<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Simone_de_Beauvoir>