Editing Anna Laetitia Barbauld (section)

===Poetry===
[[File:BarbauldMouse.jpg|right|thumb|alt=Page reads: "The MOUSE's PETITION,* Found in the Trap where he had been confin'd all Night. Parcere subjectis, & debellare superbos. VIRGIL. Oh! hear a pensive captive's prayer, For liberty that sighs; And never let thine heart be shut Against the prisoner's cries. For here forlorn and sad I sit, Within the wiry gate; *To Doctor PRIESTLEY"|"The Mouse's Petition" from Barbauld's ''Poems'' (1773)]]
Barbauld's wide-ranging poetry has been read primarily by [[feminist literary criticism|feminist literary critics]] interested in recovering women writers important in their own time, but forgotten in literary history. [[Isobel Armstrong]]'s work represents one way to do such a study; she argues that Barbauld, like other [[Romanticism|Romantic]] women poets:

{{quote|... neither consented to the idea of a special feminine discourse nor accepted an account of themselves as belonging to the realm of the nonrational. They engaged with two strategies to deal with the problem of affective discourse. First, they used the customary 'feminine' forms and languages, but they turned them to analytical account and used them to think with. Second, they challenged the male philosophical traditions that led to a demeaning discourse of feminine experience and remade those traditions.<ref>Armstrong, pp. 15–16.</ref>}}

In her subsequent analysis of "Inscription for an Ice-House" Armstrong points to Barbauld's challenge of [[Edmund Burke]]'s [[A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful|characterisation of the sublime and the beautiful]] and [[Adam Smith]]'s economic theories in ''[[The Wealth of Nations]]'' as evidence for this interpretation.<ref>Armstrong, pp. 18 and 22–23.</ref>
[[File:Poems of Anna Laetitia Aikin.tif|thumb|''Poems'' (1777)]]
The work of Marlon Ross and [[Anne K. Mellor]] represents a second way to apply the insights of [[feminist theory]] to the recovery of women writers. They argue that Barbauld and other Romantic women poets carved out a distinctive feminine voice in the literary sphere. As a woman and a dissenter, Barbauld had a unique perspective on society, according to Ross, and it was this specific position that obliged her to publish social commentary.<ref>Marlon B. Ross, "Configurations of Feminine Reform: The Woman Writers and the Tradition of Dissent." ''Re-visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837'', eds Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press (1994), p. 93.</ref> Ross points out, however, that women were in a double bind: "They could choose to speak politics in nonpolitical modes, and thus risk greatly diminishing the clarity and pointedness of their political passion, or they could choose literary modes that were overtly political while trying to infuse them with a recognizable 'feminine' decorum, again risking a softening of their political agenda".<ref>Ross, p. 94.</ref> So Barbauld and other Romantic women poets often wrote [[Occasional poetry|occasional poems]]. These had traditionally commented, often satirically, on national events, but by the end of the 18th century were increasingly serious and personal. Women wrote [[sensibility|sentimental]] poems, a style then much in vogue, on personal occasions such as the birth of a child and argued that in commenting on the small occurrences of daily life, they would establish a moral foundation for the nation.<ref>Ross, pp. 96–97.</ref> Scholars such as Ross and Mellor maintain that this adaptation of existing styles and genres is one way in which women poets created a feminine Romanticism.<ref>Mellor, Anne K. ''Romanticism and Gender'', New York: Routledge (1993), p. 7.</ref><ref>Wilson Carol Shiner, "Introduction." ''Re-visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837'', eds Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press (1994), p. 6.</ref>