Portal:Children's literature

Anna Laetitia Barbauld (/bɑːrˈboʊld/, by herself possibly /bɑrˈboʊ/, as in French) (née Aikin) (20 June 1743 – 9 March 1825) was a prominent 18th-century English poet, essayist, and children's author. A "woman of letters" who published in multiple genres, Barbauld had a successful writing career at a time when female professional writers were rare. She was a noted teacher at the celebrated Palgrave Academy and an innovative children's writer; her famous primers provided a model for pedagogy for more than a century. Her essays demonstrated that it was possible for a woman to be publicly engaged in politics, and other women authors emulated her. Even more importantly, her poetry was foundational to the development of Romanticism in England. Barbauld was also a literary critic, and her anthology of 18th-century British novels helped establish the canon as we know it today. Barbauld's literary career ended abruptly in 1812 with the publication of her poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, which criticized Britain's participation in the Napoleonic Wars. The vicious reviews shocked Barbauld and she published nothing else within her lifetime. Her reputation was further damaged when many of the Romantic poets she had inspired in the heyday of the French Revolution turned against her in their later, more conservative, years. Barbauld was remembered only as a pedantic children's writer during the 19th century, and largely forgotten during the 20th century, but the rise of feminist literary criticism in the 1980s renewed interest in her works and restored her place in literary history.

• ...that the bestselling children's book The History of the Fairchild Family by Mary Martha Sherwood inspired the character of Pip in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations?
• ...that Lord of the Nutcracker Men was a 2001 children's novel about World War I?
• ...that the German children's series Bibi Blocksberg has been criticised because it can give a negative view of politics to children?