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.
Again a number of poets are quoted as chapter-headings; this time they include at least one woman, Anna Seward
. As to plot, this novel has been categorized as a prototypical forerunner of the thriller...
Health
Ann Radcliffe
Rictor Norton believes that AR
may have suffered a nervous breakdown in 1803, after finishing Gaston de Blondeville, and another in late 1812, after the publishing of Anna Seward
's letters alleging that she...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ann Radcliffe
Critic Margaret Doody
identifies Emily's poem The Sea-Nymph as a response to Anna Seward
's Song of the Fairies to the Sea-nymphs, while Rictor Norton
notes that the incident in which Emily hears gondoliers...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ann Radcliffe
Influences on AR
's writings include the opera, contemporary travel writers, and Joseph Priestley
's Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism, 1777.
Norton, Rictor. Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe. Leicester University Press.
67
AR
probably helped to produce the fashion for literary quotation...
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...
Textual Production
Ann Radcliffe
AR
was much upset when on the first, anonymous appearance of Joanna Baillie
's Plays on the Passions she was suspected of being the author: especially when she later learned that Anna Seward
, for...
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.
She ranges through much of literary history, paying attention to figures such as Anna Seward
and Mrs John Taylor
(mother of Sarah Austin
) as well as men like Charles Dickens
. Among her non-literary...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sappho
Sappho
's name was an honorific for women writers for generations. George Puttenham
may have been the first to use it to compliment a writing woman: in Parthienades, 1579, he said that Queen Elizabeth
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck
MAS
adds a new aesthetic category, the contemplative sublime, alongside the Burke
an or terrible sublime and other categories related to the Burkean beautiful. She derives her thinking from women as well as men. In...
Publishing
Mary Scott
The Gentleman's Magazine printed MS
's Verses Addressed to Miss Seward
, on the Publication of her Monody on Major André.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Cultural formation
Mary Scott
MS
grew up in a prosperous, middle-class household, in which religion was the centre of everyday life and activity. Most sources agree that her family were Protestant Dissenters.
MS
's father was a linen manufacturer, a Dissenter according to most accounts, and a zealous supporter of the civil and religious liberties of Protestant dissenters. Among his brothers was the Rev. Russell Scott
...
Education
Mary Scott
Little is known of MS
's education, but her correspondence with Anna Seward
suggests familiarity with both classic and recent literature. Further, the knowledge she displays in The Female Advocate of women's writing in particular...
Friends, Associates
Mary Scott
MS
was probably a friend from an early age of the dissenting hymn-writer Anne Steele
, who lived not very far away and who was a generation older. They spent much time together in 1773...
