William Mccarthy. Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment (Book Review‪)‬

William McCarthy. Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. xxiv + 725. $48.35. William McCarthy has written a life of Anna Barbauld that will satisfy the general reader and offer rich material to the scholarly community. Newspaper reviews of Anna Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment have already done a fine job of telling the public what makes Barbauld intriguing and important: her poetry, her pedagogy, her version of religious sensibility, her radical defense of the French Revolution, and her critique of those who hampered the domestic campaigns against the British slave trade and against the encumbrances upon Dissenters' participation in civil society. Contemporary English writers have welcomed McCarthy's comprehensive interpretation of Barbauld's life and vocations. Kathryn Hughes, the biographer of Mrs. Beeton, writes in The Guardian that "occasionally ... a biography of such heft [the book is over 700 pages long] turns out to be a small miracle, a window not just into a life but the whole world that made it. This is what he has achieved in a thrilling, brilliant book" (19 July 2009). In The Literary Review, Claire Harmon, author of biographical studies of Jane Austen, Robert Louis Stevenson, Frances Burney, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, calls McCarthy's work a "monumental, quietly magnificent biography" (July 2009).