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
Literary responses Anne Bannerman
The notice in the Critical Review was uncomplimentary, dismissing her as an imitator of Scott , John Leyden , and William Wordsworth .
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
38 (1803): 110ff
Elfenbein, Andrew. Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role. Columbia University Press, 1999.
143
The Poetical Register praised the volume for poetical...
Literary responses Ann Radcliffe
Anna Seward , in letters which were to be published in AR 's lifetime, mixed her praise of her gothic oeuvre with some trenchant criticism.
Norton, Rictor. Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe. Leicester University Press, 1999.
221-2
Nathan Drake called Radcliffe the Shakespeare of Romance Writers...
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 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)...
Literary responses Anna Letitia Barbauld
William Enfield quoted eight lines from Aikin (as Our Poetess) in dedicating his very popular anthology The Speaker, designed for the teaching of elocution, to the head of Warrington Academy . Her volume...
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...
Literary responses Anna Letitia Barbauld
Literary admirers of the hymns included Hannah More , Anna Seward , and Elizabeth Carter , who found some passages amazingly sublime.
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
193
The innumerable children who loved and later remembered them included Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck
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...
Literary responses Melesina Trench
One of those the few who noticed and admired her poetry was Anna Seward .
Kittredge, Katharine. “Melesina Chenevix St. John Trench (1768-1827)”. The Female Spectator (1995-), Vol.
10
, No. 2, 1 June 2006–2026, pp. 4-6.
5
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, 1992.
102ff
She also addressed...
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, 2002, pp. 29-43.
32
The Critical gave it a brutal review, which began by turning seriously against the...
Literary responses Ann Yearsley
More and Elizabeth Montagu admired AY as a primitive, untrained writer whose excellence came from nature, not from carefully nurtured ability: as a phenomenon verging on a freak. More's Prefatory Letter to Yearsley's Poems, on...
Literary responses Ann Yearsley
Again one of Yearsley's most perceptive readers was Anna Seward , who wrote to Helen Maria Williams on Christmas Day 1787 that Yearsley and Burns were both miracles . . . . Perhaps she has...
Literary responses Frances Brooke
FB was listed by the Monthly Review as one of the nine British Muses in April 1774. Anna Seward in 1796 recorded her preference of the lively Brooke to Frances Burney , of whom each...
Literary responses Helen Maria Williams
The Critical's notice was long and positive. Elizabeth Gilding praised HMW 's Peru in a poem which the Gentleman's Magazine published in July, and Anna Seward in a poem which appeared the next year...

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