A Systematic Educational-Based Review of Stories and Poems: Seeking the Voice of Young Women in Charlotte Smith’s and Anna Barbauld’s Major Works—Are There Any Implications for Educational Context?

Abstract

Many researchers with an interest in the field of teaching have attempted to implement story reading and storytelling strategies in teaching oral language skills to EFL/ESL language learners as a means of extending the positive effects of storytelling and poetry on first language acquisition to second language acquisition. Numerous studies have looked at how narrative and poetry affect language abilities, but few have tried to find educational applications in well-known works of literature. To address the gap, this study was carried out to seek the voice of young women in Charlotte Smith’s and Anna Barbauld’s major works and tried to extract implications for the educational context. Charlotte Smith and Anna Barbauld, two eighteenth-century women authors, found themselves working within a literary tradition that saw Milton and Shakespeare and the poet as masculine traditions and which portrayed women as a muse for male poets. They published their works during the start of the influential Romantic Movement, which demanded an independent personality and many volumes of poetry and affected both the leading male and female writers of the day. Smith and Barbauld developed an authoritative persona to help them negotiate between societal expectations of women and those of a writer during a time when women writers were persecuted for expressing any ideas that might upset the status quo. In doing so, they challenged preconceived notions about what constitutes an authoritative voice and developed feminine poetics. This paper examines how the two poets explore the female voice, studies the challenges and problems they faced as women writers, and ponders on their influence on English literature. Additionally, this study explores how the novels of Charlotte Smith and Anna Barbauld were modified to more organically reflect aesthetic political concerns on the other side of the English Channel. This study has multiple pedagogical implications for educational environments.