Anna Baright was born into a Quaker family in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1854. She attended Cary's (Friends) School and Cook's Collegiate Institute, from which she graduated in 1873. She taught briefly in New York state before teaching elocution in Milwaukee Female College. In 1875 she entered the Boston University School of Oratory. She graduated Cum Laude in 1877.

That School was headed by Dean Lewis Baxter Monroe, who has been called a Transcendentalist, after the glory days of New England Transcendentalism. Certainly something of the transcendentalist spirit characterized the school of the Currys and somewhat influences the college today. It is a practically applied Transcendentalism that emphasizes the centrality of mind and the abilities of people to triumph over challenges that sometimes seem insurmountable.

Professor J. W. Churchill of Boston University called Anna Baright "the greatest woman reader [dramatic reciter] in the country." Dean Monroe said, "Her power is second to none, either on the platform or as a teacher."

Monroe appointed Baright his First Assistant. They were planning the country's first summer school of oratory, to be held on Martha's Vineyard, in 1879, when Monroe died. Baright carried on the work and the five-week term was highly successful. But after Monroe's death the School of Oratory was demoted to a department in the School of All Sciences and the University entrusted its leadership to a young man, later Snow Professor of Oratory, who had studied with Monroe and to whom Monroe had referred to Miss Baright as a private student: Samuel Silas Curry.