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Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice Of The Enlightenment: Book Review, Robert K. Lapp

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

The subtitle of this long-awaited, monumental biography of Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment, captures both McCarthy's achievement as a scholarly biographer and the vital relevance of Barbauld's wide-ranging and lucid articulations of Enlightenment values in Britain. McCarthy's twenty years of meticulous scholarship have literally brought to revisionary light what we need to know about a woman of letters uniquely positioned to propagate the impulses of the Enlightenment in education, literature, political debate, and religion. As McCarthy points out in his preface, "[Barbauld's] story is part of the story of Protestant Dissent's campaign for equal political rights, and …