Anna Lætitia Barbauld, born Anna Aikin on 20 June 1743 and dead on 9 March 1825, was one of the most accomplished, influential, and later most unjustly neglected writers of the British Romantic era. Poet, essayist, editor, critic, educational reformer, author for children, and public intellectual, she wrote across forms that later literary history too often separated into “major” and “minor” kinds. In her own lifetim…
“The pleasures of imagination are not confined to any particular season of life.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Political Poets, Romantic Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow
Ada Cambridge, who would become one of colonial Australia's most prolific and quietly subversive literary voices, was born on 21 November 1844 at St Germans, Norfolk, England. She was the second child of Thomasine and Henry Cambridge, a gentleman farmer of comfortable means. The Norfolk countryside, with its flat, expansive skies and ancient, weathered churches, would seep into her imagination and later resurface in…
“Evidently it is in the eye (backed by a strong imagination) of the gazer that poetic beauty lies.”
Neighbourhood:
Nature Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing