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.

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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

_____________________________ 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

___________________________ 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