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.
Anna Seward
included CS
in her list of living celebrated Female Poets
Gentleman’s Magazine. Various publishers.
(1789): 292
but spoiled the effect by mistakenly calling her Catherine.
Gentleman’s Magazine. Various publishers.
(1789): 292
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...
Literary responses
Charlotte Smith
The young Jane Austen
paid Emmeline the compliment of allusion in her comical History of England, 1791.Anna Seward
, on the other hand, condemned CS
for indelicacy because she had exposed her husband's...
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...
Literary responses
Ann Radcliffe
Again she had the lead review spot in the Critical, which loved the book and quoted at length.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall.
2d ser. 14 (1795): 241-55
The British Critic also praised it, but some papers regretted that...
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.
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
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...
Elfenbein, Andrew. Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role. Columbia University Press.
143
The Poetical Register praised the volume for poetical...
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
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
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.
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
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.
