Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Anna Seward
-
Standard Name: Seward, Anna
Birth Name: Anna Seward
Nickname: The Swan of Lichfield
Nickname: Nancy
AS
, living at a distance from London, was nevertheless a woman of letters, of the later eighteenth century and just beyond. She staked her claim to fame firstly on her poetry (though she was always willing to try genres unusual to her, like sermons and a biography of Erasmus Darwin
), secondly on her letters. In these and in her newspaper contributions she was also a literary critic, familiar with the criteria of both the Augustan and Romantic eras and gifted besides with an unfailing independence of judgement.
She ranges through much of literary history, paying attention to figures such as Anna Seward
and Mrs John Taylor
(mother of Sarah Austin
) as well as men like Charles Dickens
. Among her non-literary...
Textual Features
Anna Miller
Apart from Anna Seward
, the volumes contain only a handful of women's names, but nearly half the contributions are given anonymously. The male poets honoured include Richard Graves
and William Hayley
.
Textual Features
Mary Russell Mitford
MRM
's letters regularly indulge in analysis of books. She comments on works by both men and women, in English and French, and her opinions shift a good deal with age. She reacted with horror...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
EOB
writes in terms of a women's tradition: for instance, she praises Barbauld
for praising Elizabeth Rowe
. She makes confident judgements and attributions (she is sure that Lady Pakington
is the real author of...
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
This collection of personal writing includes occasional poems, pastorals, burlesques, ambitious longer pieces, and The Choice of Life (which precedes Johnson
's Rasselas). Notes and an index which she later supplied to this volume...
Textual Features
Susanna Watts
Ephemera of all kinds have been bound in: family anecdotes, a letter of William Cowper
of 1788, a Hindu Primer (or alphabet), a railway ticket of 1839, women's parliamentary petitions against slavery of 1833 (one...
Textual Features
Anne Grant
Her range of literary reference and comment is wide: as well as Richardson
(whose Clarissa she unequivocally praises),
Grant, Anne. Letters from the Mountains. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme.
In this book the ancient and imposing but crumbling manor house is an emblem of English society as a whole: a trope which was to be popular with later novelists. The downtrodden orphan heroine, Monimia...
Textual Features
Mary Jones
This elegy opens by calling on the Muses to celebrate public spirit: its lament for a national hero shares its tone with later such poems by Anna Seward
, which it may well have influenced.
Textual Features
Jane Harvey
The contents include descriptive and melancholy sonnets, satire, autobiography, and politics (including a poem on the horrors of slavery, addressed to William Wilberforce
, and another about the sorrow of a woman whose lover has...
Textual Features
Joanna Baillie
The poems present human shifts of mood and quirks of feeling. They are sensitively observed and charmingly written. The only modern poets she yet knew of to admire, JB
said later, were William Hayley
and...
Reception
Hannah More
Again this work generated both a flood of praise (much of it in letters, some coming from religious leaders or from royalty) and a storm of criticism and abuse.
Jones, Mary Gwladys. Hannah More. Cambridge University Press.
120
The Bishop of London...
Reception
Hannah Glasse
This book came to dominate its field. It was widely believed in the book-trade to be the work of a man. The publisher Edward Dilly
in 1778 informed a gathering which included Samuel Johnson
and...
