page_title: Anna Laetitia Barbauld
section_title: Stoke Newington: an end to a literary career
hierarchical_section_title: Anna Laetitia Barbauld / Stoke Newington: an end to a literary career
caption_attribution_description: Title page from Anna Barbauld's Eighteen Hundred and Eleven
context_page_description: Anna Laetitia Barbauld was a prominent English poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, and author of children's literature.
  A "woman of letters" who published in multiple genres, Barbauld had a successful writing career at a time when women rarely wrote professionally. She was a noted teacher at the Palgrave Academy and an innovative writer of works for children; her primers provided a model for more than a century. Her essays showed it was possible for a woman to be publicly engaged in politics; other women authors such as Elizabeth Benger emulated her. Barbauld's literary career spanned numerous periods in British literary history: her work promoted the values of the Enlightenment and of sensibility, while her poetry made a founding contribution to the development of British Romanticism. Barbauld was also a literary critic. Her anthology of 18th-century novels helped to establish the canon as it is known today.
  Barbauld's career as a poet ended abruptly in 1812, with the publication of Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, which criticised Britain's participation in the Napoleonic Wars. She was shocked by the vicious reviews it received and published nothing else in her lifetime.
context_section_description: In 1802, the Barbaulds moved to Stoke Newington, where Rochemont took over the pastoral duties of the Unitarian Chapel at Newington Green. Barbauld herself was happy to be nearer her brother, John, as her husband's mind was rapidly failing. Rochemont developed a "violent antipathy to his wife and he was liable to fits of insane fury directed against her. One day at dinner he seized a knife and chased her round the table so that she only saved herself by jumping out of the window." Such scenes repeated themselves to Barbauld's great sadness and real danger, but she refused to leave him. Rochemont drowned himself in the nearby New River in 1808 and Barbauld was overcome with grief. When she returned to writing, she produced the radical poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812), which depicted England as a ruin. It was reviewed so viciously that Barbauld never published another work in her lifetime, although it is now often viewed by scholars as her greatest poetic achievement. She died in 1825, a renowned writer, and was buried in the family vault in St Mary's, Stoke Newington. After her death, a marble tablet was erected in the Newington Green Chapel with the following inscription:
caption: Original title page from Eighteen Hundred and Eleven
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