Anna Seward

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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.
Photograph of a painting of Anna Seward by Tilly Kettle, 1762. Seward is seated at a desk with a little book of Milton's poetry in front of her. She is wearing a white gauzy bodice with wide sleeves, a deep pink mantle edged with brown fur, and a black ribbon and a string of pearls as a choker around her neck. Her dark hair is pinned on top of her head with a pearl ornament. National Portrait Gallery.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Textual Production Lady Eleanor Butler
LEB and Sarah Ponsonby wrote some of their voluminous correspondence jointly. Writing was one of their major pleasures; they selected paper with loving care, and kept an equally careful tally of replies received and of...
Friends, Associates Jane Cave
It is possible, though this is speculative, that JC became acquainted while living at Winchester with the hymn-writer Anne Steele (who lived not far away), with Anna Seward and Hannah More (who were friends of...
Intertextuality and Influence Jane Cave
This edition arranges the poems by genre (unlike all her later editions), and includes an errata leaf. It also has a portrait of the author with a pen in her hand poised awkwardly over the...
Literary responses Hannah Cowley
Anna Seward included HC among her seven celebrated Female Poets
Gentleman’s Magazine. Various publishers.
59 (1789): 292
of the present day in April 1789. Recent critical comment on her includes an examination of her use of marriage law in...
Literary responses Mary Whateley Darwall
In April 1774 (ten years on from her first volume but long before her second) the Monthly Review (in a notice of Hannah More 's The Inflexible Captive) listed MWD as one of the...
Cultural formation Mary Delany
In Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes, 2011, Lisa L. Moore classified MD , along with the Duchess of Portland , Anna Seward , and the American Sarah Pierce (1767-1852), as lesbian-like women...
Leisure and Society Elizabeth, Margravine of Anspach
As hostess she entertained a talented and faintly bohemian circle. The Prince of Wales came to breakfast, but some ladies at the head of society found her not sufficiently respectable to visit. George III felt...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Anne Katharine Elwood
Some of the British women writers discussed in the text remain well-known, but others have slipped into obscurity. Memoirs includes: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu , Griselda Murray , Frances Seymour, Lady Hertford , Hester Lynch Piozzi
Textual Production Catherine Fanshawe
The letters that CF sent to Anne Grant are not extant, but Grant's side of the correspondence leaves no doubt that the two were in constant dialogue about new books they had read, and their...
Textual Features Elizabeth Graeme Ferguson
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...
Literary responses Anne Finch
Barbara McGovern has disposed (hopefully once and for all) of the mistaken story of Pope 's hostility to AF . In fact, they shared a literary friendship which Finch found valuable.
McGovern, Barbara. Anne Finch and Her Poetry: A Critical Biography. University of Georgia Press.
102ff
She also addressed...
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...
Literary responses Anne Grant
Letters from the Mountains was not noticed in the Edinburgh Review, an omission which Grant attributed to gender prejudice.
Perkins, Pamela. “Anne Grant and the Professionalization of Privacy”. Authorship, Commerce and the Public: Scenes of Writing, 1750-1850, edited by Emma Clery et al., Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 29-43.
32
The Critical gave it a brutal review, which began by turning seriously against the...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Anne Grant
This contains autobiographical fragments and insightful comments on other women writers. Objects of AG 's comment include Susan Ferrier , Charlotte Smith (whose poems AG felt to be easy, flowing, and correct, but low on...
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.
2: 45-8
it encompasses Blair , Sterne and Smollett as travel-writers, and Homer . Grant charges Samuel Johnson

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