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
Intertextuality and Influence Sarah Green
Literary discussion spills over from the preface into the text. The Rev. Edward Marsham, surprisingly for one of his profession, finds Hannah More 's Coelebs too religious; he prefers canonical novelists who teach virtue and...
Publishing Elizabeth Hands
The advertisement for the book in print, like the pre-notification, was carried by Jopson's Coventry Mercury. The volume was dedicated to the dramatist Bertie Greatheed . It was issued in two forms: ordinary copies...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence Jane Harvey
The title-page quotes Anna Seward . JH uses a more elaborate style in this novel than formerly. It centres on Matilda, daughter of the widowed Earl of Colchester, and on Mrs Clarendon, the widow of...
Friends, Associates Mary Hays
In later life she was friendly with Penelope Pennington (with whom she stayed at Bristol) and Hester Piozzi , Anna Seward , and Hannah More , whom she met there.
Hays, Mary. “Chronology and Introduction”. The Correspondence (1779-1843) of Mary Hays, British Novelist, edited by Marilyn Brooks, Edwin Mellen, pp. xv - xx; 1.
xvii
Reception Héloïse
Anna Seward 's Memoirs of Abelard and Eloisa, 1805, certainly ranks as scholarship, though it concerns itself more with reputation and afterlife than with the actual life or writings of Héloïse . From the...
Family and Intimate relationships Fanny Holcroft
Thomas Holcroft held progressive ideas about women and their education, as he showed in 1794 in a brief review of Miss or Mrs. C. Short 's Dramas for the Use of Young Ladies (to which...
Textual Production Margaret Holford
Having been writing verse from the age of eight, and publishing a volume of short poems in her thirties, Margaret Holford the younger included one piece of which she flags the date (when she was...
Literary responses Margaret Holford
In June 1806 Seward wrote to a friend who had just met the young Holford, about Holford's poetry and particularly the beautiful elegy, addressed to me (which may or may not be the above-mentioned ode)...
Intertextuality and Influence Margaret Holford
The American-born British officer Spencer Thomas Vassall, aged forty, was mortally wounded while leading his troops at the storming of Montevideo on 3 February 1807. His body was brought home and buried at Bristol under...
Dedications Margaret Holford
The elder Margaret Holford published with her name, through the Minerva Press , First Impressions; or, The Portrait. A Novel, in four volumes, dedicated to Anna Seward .
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press.
2: 135-6
Friends, Associates Margaret Holford
MH 's friends were said to include Anna Seward .
She is not mentioned in Teresa Barnard 's biography of Seward.
After her eldest daughter became famous and developed a correspondence with Joanna Baillie ...
Dedications Margaret Holford
Published by Hookham and Carpenter , this was a slim volume of 44 pages, with a title-page quotation from Pope 's Windsor Forest, and a handsome illustration of Gresford Lodge near Wrexham in Denbighshire...
Friends, Associates Frances Jacson
The Jacson sisters became acquainted with the literary circle in Lichfield which also included Erasmus Darwin , Anna Seward , and Thomas Day , as well as their cousin Sir Brooke Boothby , who probably introduced them there.
Shteir, Ann B. “Botanical Dialogues: Maria Jacson and Women’s Popular Science Writing in England”. Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol.
23
, No. 3, pp. 301-17.
308
Friends, Associates Maria Elizabetha Jacson
Probably through their cousin Sir Brooke Boothby , the Jacson sisters became acquainted with an intellectually-minded group of people of both sexes based in Lichfield: Erasmus Darwin as well as Anna Seward and Thomas Day

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