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.
Apart from Anna Seward
, the volumes contain only a handful of women's names, but nearly half the contributions are given anonymously. The male poets honoured include Richard Graves
and William Hayley
.
Textual Features
Mary Russell Mitford
MRM
's letters regularly indulge in analysis of books. She comments on works by both men and women, in English and French, and her opinions shift a good deal with age. She reacted with horror...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
EOB
writes in terms of a women's tradition: for instance, she praises Barbauld
for praising Elizabeth Rowe
. She makes confident judgements and attributions (she is sure that Lady Pakington
is the real author of...
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
This collection of personal writing includes occasional poems, pastorals, burlesques, ambitious longer pieces, and The Choice of Life (which precedes Johnson
's Rasselas). Notes and an index which she later supplied to this volume...
Textual Features
Susanna Watts
Ephemera of all kinds have been bound in: family anecdotes, a letter of William Cowper
of 1788, a Hindu Primer (or alphabet), a railway ticket of 1839, women's parliamentary petitions against slavery of 1833 (one...
Textual Features
Anne Grant
Her range of literary reference and comment is wide: as well as Richardson
(whose Clarissa she unequivocally praises),
Grant, Anne. Letters from the Mountains. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme.
In this book the ancient and imposing but crumbling manor house is an emblem of English society as a whole: a trope which was to be popular with later novelists. The downtrodden orphan heroine, Monimia...
Textual Features
Mary Jones
This elegy opens by calling on the Muses to celebrate public spirit: its lament for a national hero shares its tone with later such poems by Anna Seward
, which it may well have influenced.
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...
Textual Features
Joanna Baillie
The poems present human shifts of mood and quirks of feeling. They are sensitively observed and charmingly written. The only modern poets she yet knew of to admire, JB
said later, were William Hayley
and...
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...
Textual Production
Catherine Fanshawe
The letters that CF
sent to Anne Grant
are not extant, but Grant's side of the correspondence leaves no doubt that the two were in constant dialogue about new books they had read, and their...
Textual Production
Eglinton Wallace
It appeared in two different editions put out this year through the different publishers T. Hookham
, and Debrett
. The Debrett edition lists the price, one shilling and sixpence, on the title-page.
“Eighteenth Century Collections Online”. Gale Databases.
Goethe's novel...
Textual Production
Mary Bryan
The preface to the work writhes between expression and suppression. MB
alternately fears being blamed for vanity or presumption
Bryan, Mary, and Jonathan Wordsworth. Sonnets and Metrical Tales 1815. Woodstock Books.
viii
and hints at her ambition, citing Charlotte Smith
. She admires Smith for having succeeded...
