William Wordsworth called her the best female poet of her generation and Coleridge once walked 40 miles just to meet her.
So why have so few people heard of the eighteenth century poet Anna Laetitia Barbauld? Whereas the work of women novelists of the time such as Jane Austen and Fanny Burney is well known, the female poets have been left to languish in historical oblivion. But even today little is known about Anna Letitia, a radical thinker whose children's books influenced a whole generation of thinkers well into the nineteenth century. Sheila finds out out more about Anna Laetitia Barbauld.
