It presents a faithful color facsimile of the first edition and text versions of the poems. While scholars wishing to consult the first edition may access the text, the facsimile also provides a means to introduce students to material aspects of book production and is intended to make the physical book have a reality and a bearing upon the experience of reading the poems.
Several motives define the purpose of our project.
We wish to transcend the limitations of the printed page to explore a different sort of editing in which the limits of what is possible to achieve in a printed edition might be extended. We want to raise questions about how works are produced by one age and how they are received by subsequent eras. We would like to think that our work might be seen as complementary to the number of recent anthologies that include Barbauld's work and to William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft's authoritative edition, The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld . Above all, hypertext offers an exciting means to respond to questions of how one may learn to read poetry by women writing in period of 1790-1830 after such long neglect. It is meant not only as a teaching tool, but as a model for hypertextual editing.