In 1810, she published one of the most important long poems by a woman from the British Romantic era, her Epistles on Women (1810), the first text in English to re-write the entire history of western culture, from the creation story of Genesis through the eighteenth century, from a feminist perspective. Responding to John Milton’s portrayal of Eve in Paradise Lost as unequal and inferior to Adam, and Alexander Pope’s misogynistic “Epistle to a Lady,” Aikin argues that men’s degradation of women has hindered the growth of civilization, and provides historical and literary evidence for her claim that “man cannot degrade woman without degrading himself.”
During her own lifetime, Aikin was best known for her work as a historian, specifically her three, two-volume court histories: Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth (1818), Memoirs of the Court of James I (1822), and Memoirs of the Court of Charles I (1833). Both critically and commercially successful, these books were frequently reprinted in England and America in the nineteenth century, and were translated into German, Dutch and French shortly after they were first published. The Eclectic Review spoke for many when it declared, in 1819, that with Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth readers were “put into possession of more correct information relating to those times, than they could obtain from any other single work.” Fifteen years later, in 1834, an American reviewer summed up her achievement as follows: “Aikin has done more to illustrate modern English history than almost any of the numerous and able writers, who, within the last fifty years, have turned their attention to the subject.” For an account of Aikin’s historical writing, see Michelle Levy, “‘The different genius of woman’: Lucy Aikin’s Historiography” in The Dissenting Mind: The Aikin Circle, 1740–1860. Eds. Felicity James and Ian Inkster. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011.
In reviewing the Correspondence of William Ellery Channing and Lucy Aikin 1826–1842 (1784), letters exchanged between Aikin and the foremost American Unitarian of the early nineteenth century, a young Henry James described her as “Clever, sagacious, shrewd, a blue-stocking, and an accomplished writer,” and “wonder[ed] why her vigorous intellectual temperament has not attracted independent notice.” This website is an online companion to the edition of Lucy Aikin’s Epistles on Women and other Works, co-edited by Anne Mellor and Michelle Levy and published by Broadview Press in 2010. Its aim is to bring to Aikin the ‘independent notice’ James suggested was her due in 1874.
