Anna Seward

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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.

Milestones

1 December 1742

AS was born at Eyam in Derbyshire, where her father was then rector.
Eyam was pronounced eem. Biographer Margaret Ashmun gives the birth-date in new style (eleven days later) although new style was not to come in for a decade after this.
Ashmun, Margaret. The Singing Swan. Yale University Press; H. Milford, Oxford University Press.
1, 4

October 1762-June 1768

AS preserved her letters from these years, as juvenilia.
Barnard, Teresa. Anna Seward: A Constructed Life. A Critical Biography. Ashgate.
9
Lucas, Edward Verrall. A Swan and Her Friends. Methuen.
315

May 1773

The thirty-year-old AS wrote one of her most forceful letters, polished like a polemical essay, about the prospect confronting a middle-class woman who does not marry.
Chisholm, Kate. “Bluestocking Feminism”. New Rambler, pp. 60-6.
60

1784

AS began transcribing copies selected from among her voluminous letters into large bound volumes, with eventual publication in mind.
Ashmun, Margaret. The Singing Swan. Yale University Press; H. Milford, Oxford University Press.
110

29 April 1802

AS wrote her first surviving letter to the young Walter Scott , with a detailed critique of his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, of which he had sent her the first volume (not the first work he had submitted to her).
Ashmun, Margaret. The Singing Swan. Yale University Press; H. Milford, Oxford University Press.
251

25 March 1809

AS died in the Bishop's Palace at Lichfield, and died as few poets do, rich.
Ashmun, Margaret. The Singing Swan. Yale University Press; H. Milford, Oxford University Press.
289
Ashmun, Margaret. The Singing Swan. Yale University Press; H. Milford, Oxford University Press.
264

May 1811

AS 's six-volume Letters . . . written between the years 1784 and 1807 were posthumously published: not edited by Scott (as she had requested).
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall.
3d ser. 23 (1811): 112

Biography

Birth and Family

1 December 1742

AS was born at Eyam in Derbyshire, where her father was then rector.
Eyam was pronounced eem. Biographer Margaret Ashmun gives the birth-date in new style (eleven days later) although new style was not to come in for a decade after this.
Ashmun, Margaret. The Singing Swan. Yale University Press; H. Milford, Oxford University Press.
1, 4

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