British Novelists, The Edited by Anna Lætitia Barbauld

Abstract

When bookseller Thomas Longman planned a 50-volume collection of previously published British novels, he chose Anna Lætitia (also Letitia) Barbauld (née Aikin 1743–1825) to assist with selection, pen a critical introduction to the entire collection, and provide prefaces to each featured novel. Longman enlisted Barbauld for the weight she lent this collection, the first of its kind. She produced a selection that established a canon that endures to this day and gives strong representation to women writers, coupled with an introductory essay, titled “On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing,” and critical prefaces that advanced the theory of the novel while praising the genre for fostering core middle class British values such as domesticity, sensibility, and private virtue. The collection went into print in 1810. Her essays in The British Novelists display the authoritative voice of a mature literary professional while diverging from the many contemporaries who demand from the genre a moral purpose. Barbauld emphasizes instead the value of entertainment and the solace novel reading can provide. Barbauld’s efforts on The British Novelists constitute the largest and most ambitious critical and editing work of her long and productive literary career.