Readings in Fiction : History of Children's Literature to 1837 - ENG 360 Resource Guide

from The Cambridge Guide to Children's Books in English
English writers. The sisters were born into an industrious, nonconformist, literary family living at various times in London, Lavenham and Ongar. Together they wrote three collections of poetry which sold in large numbers and influenced children’s poetry in a more child-centred direction.

Ann and Jane Taylor, the authors of Original Poems for Infant Minds (1804-1805) and Rhymes for the Nursery (1806), stand immortalized as girls of ten and eight in the likeness of them that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Painted in 1792 by their father, Isaac, the picture shows the sisters in the garden at Lavenham, Suffolk, where "they were wont, before the eldest was six years old, to pace up and down the green walks, hand in hand, lisping a simple couplet of their joint composition" (I. Taylor 5).