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.
A particular sparring partner of AJ
, who would attack her boldest reasoning, with his quaint and lively repartees, was the young William Paley
, later an eminent theologian.
Meadley, George William. “Memoir of Mrs. Jebb”. The Monthly Repository, Vol.
Howe, Susanne. Geraldine Jewsbury: Her Life and Errors. George Allen and Unwin.
72
Beginning in...
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.
Friends, Associates
J. S. Anna Liddiard
She wrote that Lady Eleanor Butler
and Sarah Ponsonby
, the Ladies of Llangollen, treated her with very kind and flattering attention when she visited them.
Liddiard, J. S. Anna. Kenilworth and Farley Castle: with Other Poems. Hibernia–Press Office.
prelims
She may perhaps have known Anna Seward
Reception
J. S. Anna Liddiard
The Poetical Register damned this volume with faint praise, as not disfigured by any gross faults. In the preface to her next work, JSAL
took issue with the Monthly's yet more unflattering notice, which...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Alice Meynell
Many of the essays reprinted here focus on women writers who were, to put it mildly, little known to the public in the 1940s. These included: Anna Seward
and Joanna Baillie
, as well as...
death
Anna Miller
She was buried in Bath Abbey, with a poetic epitaph by Anna Seward
.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
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
.
Occupation
Anna Miller
The Batheaston Vase was important in several literary careers, notably those of Anna Seward
, Jane Bowdler
, and Mary Alcock
. Other winners, like Jane Johnson
's daughter Barbara
, seem never to have...
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...
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.
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Judith Sargent Murray
She backs this pleasure in modernity with a remarkable grasp of former female history and of the women's literary tradition in English and its contexts. She mentions the Greek foremother Sappho
, the patriotic heroism...
Literary responses
Amelia Opie
The Critical Review introduced its laudatory notice by praising the current standard of women's poetry (a tradition, it says, less than a century old). It invokes the canonical names of Seward
, Barbauld
, and...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Sarah Pearson
The poem picked out by the Critical Review as the principal one, occupying fourteen pages, is entitled Lines found on the Stairs of the Tour de la Chapelle of the Bastile. These lines, powerful...
