Eaton Stannard Barrett was one of many talented and ambitious Irish men and women of his time who made a name in "literature of the day." These writers included the journalist Pierce Egan, the novelist and writer for children Maria Edgeworth, the poet Thomas Moore, the Gothic novelist Regina Maria Roche, the novelist and playwright Charles Robert Maturin, and the writer of "national Tales" Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan. A few of Barrett's miscellaneous topical satires in verse and prose had brief but intense popularity. His best-known work, however, was The Heroine (1813), a novel parodying the fictional feminisms of the 1790s and early 1800s as part of a remasculization of culture and literature.

Barrett's family was from Navan in County Meath, Ireland. He is said to have been born at Cork, Ireland, and educated with his brother Richard at a school in Wandsworth, near London. There he was apparently...