Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives is the first collection of essays on poet and public intellectual Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743-1825). By international scholars of eighteenth-century and Romantic British literature, these new essays survey Barbauld's writing from early to late: her versatility as a stylist, her poetry, her books for children, her political writing, her performance as editor and reviewer. They explore themes of sociability, materiality, and affect in Barbauld's writing, and trace her reception and influence. Rooted in enlightenment philosophy and ethics and dissenting religion, Barbauld's work exerted a huge impact on the generation of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and on education and ideas about childhood far into the nineteenth century. William McCarthy's introduction explores the importance of Barbauld's work today, and co-editor Olivia Murphy assesses the commentary on Barbauld that followed her rediscovery in the early 1990s. Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives is the indispensible introduction to Barbauld's work and current thinking about it.

Despite being an aristocrat and a woman, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) made herself a writer. Although she was long well-known as a `character', letter writer, and traveller, this revised paperback edition of her writings appears at a time when interest in her literary work is now widespread and serious. Lady Mary saw herself as `haunted by the Daemon of Poesie'. She wrote literary criticism of Addison and the only essay by a woman published in the Spectator, together with spirited verse replies to Pope and Swift and passionate love-poems which dispute the period's label `Age of Reason'. Her essays (some published anonymously in newspapers) and poems (many of which appeared with her secret connivance) deal with issues still alive and accessible today: love, marriage, prejudice against women writers, and the medical breakthrough of smallpox innoculation. Her comedy, Simplicity, has been recently revived in productions around the UK. Hard-hitting, eloquent, and often funny, the work of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu will be essential reading for the growing number of scholars, students and general readers of women's writing.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) is one of the most important women writers between Aphra Behn and Jane Austen, and one of her period's most provocative and entertaining writers of either sex. The narratives in this volume, with the exception of one juvenile piece, have never been printed before. They show the author experimenting with the genres of fiction and autobiography, more influenced by French models than by English, but always working experimentally against the grain of her various traditions. Besides page-turning narrative, these works offer the rare opportunity of a completely fresh take on literary movements, cross-cultural relations, gender ideologies, and other literary debates of the early eighteenth century. Our existing picture of what was once possible in literature and what was possible for women at this time cannot remain unchanged once these writings appear.

With interest growing in the tradition of women's writing, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) has been transformed from a colourful eccentric to an important writer. This life is the first to take her writing achievement seriously, as well as re-telling a life-story which every newly uncovered detail renders more extraordinary.

Here we come to know Jane Austen by the company she keeps: her predecessors Fielding, Sterne, Lennox, and Burney, her contemporary Scott, and her successors Waugh and Amis--comic novelists all. And comedy is the connection between these twelve elegant essays by the distinguished academic Bruce Stovel, who most lovingly engages Austen herself through his studies of her comic novels, her art of conversation, her pleasure principle, and her prayers. Edited by Nora Foster Stovel, the collection includes an introduction by Juliet McMaster and an afterword by Isobel Grundy.