SOURCE: "'Ladies . . . Taking the Pen in Hand': Mrs. Barbauld's Criticism of Eighteenth-Century Women Novelists," in Fetter'd or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670-1815, edited by Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski, Ohio University Press, 1986, pp. 383-97.

In the following excerpt, Moore reviews Barbauld's essays on novelists and argues that she made important contributions to the history and theory of the novel.

A versatile woman—poet, essayist, polemicist, hymnwriter, children's writer, educator, critic—Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825) never wrote a novel. As an avid reader of novels, as well as a respected writer for nearly forty years, and the editor of Samuel Richardson's Correspondence (1804), she was well-qualified in 1810 to serve as editor of the fifty-volume British Novelists, with an Essay and Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, published that year. This collection includes twenty-one novelists, twenty-eight novels, and twenty essays by Mrs. Barbauld, including a long introductory essay, "On the Origin and...