Mary Wollstonecraft and Anna Laetitia Barbauld: Devotion, Providence, and Prayer

This article explores the interconnections between the work of Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Mary Wollstonecraft. I argue that despite apparent differences between the gender politics and religious practice of the two, Wollstonecraft was strongly indebted to Barbauld, in particular to Barbauld’s account of religious devotion. I focus on their reading anthologies for young women, Wollstonecraft’s Female Reader (1789) and Barbauld’s Female Speaker (1811), to show that Barbauld’s work was a model for Wollstonecraft’s account of devotional feeling, divine Providence, and the use of the voice in prayer, and that Barbauld celebrated Wollstonecraft’s embodied devotional practice in her own later writings.