Career
In 1773 she published Poems, and with her brother John wrote Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, a work praised by Dr. Johnson and C. J. Fox.
When Rochemont's health broke down, the Barbaulds toured France for a year and then settled in Hampstead. Here Mrs. Barbauld wrote such impassioned pamphlets in support of the French Revolution, religious toleration, and the abolition of the slave trade that Horace Walpole called her "that virago Barbauld." She also collaborated with her brother in the popular Evenings at Home for children. In 1802 the Barbaulds moved to Stoke Newington. Six years later Rochemont drowned himself in the river nearby. Mrs. Barbauld now occupied herself in editing the works of the British novelists in fifty volumes, and in composing her long poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812), which foretold the decay of the Old World. Her posthumous Works (1825) contains some of her best poems, notably "Life! I know not what thou art," which was envied by Wordsworth. Mrs. Barbauld was greatly admired as a poet and as the first serious writer of children's literature.