Anna Seward

English poet

• Born: December 12, 1742
• Birthplace: Eyam, Derbyshire, England
• Died: March 25, 1809
• Place of death: Lichfield, Staffordshire, England

Seward, a major contributor to the eighteenth century’s revival of the sonnet, also wrote the poetical novel Louisa, which could be viewed as a successful experiment that anticipated themes and modes of Romantic expression.

Early Life

Anna Seward was the daughter of Thomas Seward, rector of Eyam, Derbyshire, prebendary of Salisbury and canon residentiary of Lichfield, and Elizabeth Hunter, daughter of John Hunter, headmaster of Lichfield grammar school, where writer Samuel Johnson studied. One sister, Sarah, was born in 1744; none of the three siblings born thereafter survived.

When Anna was seven years old, her family moved into Bishop’s Palace in Lichfield, the town where Anna remained until her death. She spent her adolescence with her sister Sarah until Sarah’s death in 1764. The five-year-old Honora Sneyd, who had been adopted by the Sewards and lived with them from 1754 to 1768, became Anna’s companion and pupil.

Anna’s father, poet and author of “The Female Right to Literature” (1748), taught Anna to read William Shakespeare, John Milton, and Alexander Pope when she was just three years old. At age nine, she was reciting Paradise Lost, and soon she was also reading John Dryden, among others.

Bishop’s Palace was a provincial salon, a place of cultural engagement, attended by literary, scientific, and clerical thinkers, including Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin, and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, father of Maria Edgeworth. Darwin became Anna Seward’s mentor, but his advocacy of her as a poet interfered with her parents’ progressive attitudes toward her education. Thereafter, she was restrained from writing poetry, although she continued to do so secretly. It may be that without Darwin’s mentorship, she would have been a far superior poet. After his death, she wrote Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin (1804).

None of Seward’s courtships led to marriage, some because of a lack of fortune and some because her suitors were not good prospective husbands—grist for her literary treatment of the “marriage market.”

Life’s Work

Anna Seward’s life, seemingly idyllic and carefree, did not remain so. The care of ailing parents fell to her, with her mother dying in 1780 and her father, suffering from failing mental and physical faculties, dying ten years later. After her father’s death, she remained in the palace for the rest of her life, becoming the provincial salonnière of Lichfield. Seward was noted for her fine reading voice and for presentations of Shakespeare and other dramatic works as well as for her impressive presence.

In 1769, Seward had met John André, later Major André, who fell in love with Honora. Seward’s description of their romance in her Monody on the Death of Major André (1781) led to her establishing several lifelong correspondences. When Richard Lovell Edgeworth returned to Lichfield with Thomas Day in 1770 (both were interested in physical science and drawn to Lichfield by Darwin’s work), they were attracted to Honora. Although of these three, Seward favored André for Honora, it was not to be, and Honora married Edgeworth in 1773; by opposing the marriage, Seward painfully estranged herself from Honora. Honora’s death from consumption (tuberculosis) in 1780 grieved Seward, who mourned her in poetry for years. As Edgeworth’s second wife, Honora had been the beloved stepmother of Maria Edgeworth.

In 1778, Seward was invited by Lady Anna “Laura” Miller to her salon at Bath-Easton, where Seward was awarded first prize for her poem “Invocation of the Comic Muse,” the first of many prizes awarded her at the Bath-Easton poetry contests, and where Seward found encouragement for her writing. After Miller’s death, Seward wrote Miller’s epitaph inscribed on her monument in Bath Abbey as well as in her “Poem to the Memory of Lady Miller” (1782).

Known as “the Swan of Lichfield,” Seward was highly praised by many during her lifetime. Her Elegy on Captain Cook was reviewed favorably by Samuel Johnson and in the Monthly Review (1780), attracting the attention of literary circles. One of her admirers, William Hayley, among the most popular poets in Britain in his day, considered her a “female genius.” He began their correspondence by sending his own verses to her, commending her Elegy on Captain Cook. Hayley was known for his enormously popular The Triumphs of Temper and for the Poetic Epistle on Epic Poetry, called by Robert Southey one of the most influential scholarly books of its day.

Seward’s Louisa: A Poetical Novel, in Four Epistles (1782), which explores cross-genre aesthetics similar to those of Romantic -era verse-romances, contributed to the evolution of the novel by examining the growth of the passions rather than emphasizing plot as its aesthetic device. Praised by Hayley, James Boswell, and others, it had appeared in five editions by 1792.

One of Seward’s well-known associations was with Samuel Johnson, whom she refused to idolize. She took personally his devaluation of the cultural life of Lichfield, disagreed with his denigration of pre-Romanticism, and abhorred his misanthropy. After Johnson’s death in 1784, Boswell, with whom Seward had enjoyed a brief friendship, even after she repelled an unwanted advance from him, wrote to Seward requesting information concerning Johnson for his famous work The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791). To Boswell, she wrote of the forthcoming biography, “If faithful, brilliant will be its lights, but deep its shades.” She was concerned that Boswell and Hester Lynch Piozzi (also known as Mrs. Thrale) were creating a Johnson legacy that distorted the truth. So in Gentleman’s Magazine, she published letters signed “Benvolio” that disputed what she regarded as Boswell’s and Piozzi’s unwarranted adulation of Johnson’s qualities, ignoring his intolerance, irritability, and insolence. Johnson himself had asked for Seward when he was dying. She was deeply sympathetic to the sufferings of his last days and often attended him.

In May, 1786, she made one of her rare visits to London, this time for the appearance of her Horatian Odes in the Gentleman’s Magazine. Although she knew neither Greek nor Latin, but worked from prose translations, she sought to bring forth the poetic spirit of the originals into her translations. In her collection Original Sonnets on Various Subjects, and Odes Paraphrased from Horace (1799), Seward included a preface reestablishing the sonnet’s place in English letters. Further literary criticism may be found in her essays and correspondence.

Among the acquaintances she made in the 1780’s and 1790’s, in Lichfield, were General Eliott, the “Hero of Gibraltar,” who was the subject of her Ode on General Eliott’s Return from Gibraltar; Piozzi and her second husband, whom Seward found engaging, in contrast to Johnson’s loathing; and Hannah More, whom she met in 1791 at the home of Thomas Sedgewick Whalley in the Mendips, Somerset. With More, Seward had little affinity, Seward being a latitudinarian in her Anglicanism, with small patience for Evangelicalism.

John Saville was, as she said, her “soul’s dearest friend.” The vicar-choral of Lichfield Cathedral, Saville and Seward shared a mutual though impossible devotion because he was already married. Given that there was no talk of scandal in the cathedral town, their relationship must have been overtly platonic.

In 1792, Seward began fearing for her own health and that of Saville, leading to depression followed by bouts of illness and searches for palliation through medical practices such as bleeding and hydrotherapy. For the last decade of the century, she traveled for medical as well as social reasons, suffering from mixed rheumatic illnesses, perhaps environmental allergies, and possibly asthma.

In 1795, Seward met Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, the so-called Ladies of Llangollen, during the first of many visits to Dinbren in Wales, after which Seward published Llangollen Vale, with Other Poems (1796). The collection treats the topic of female friendship. Seward would correspond with them for more than a decade.

In December, 1801, Saville suffered a paralytic seizure and was placed in Bishop’s Palace for more than one month, nursed back to health, temporarily, by Seward and by his daughter; he died two years later, on August 2, 1803, at the age of sixty-eight. Seward paid his debts, provided for his family, and built a memorial to him. She lived on, grief-stricken and ill, for five more years, less and less able to complete her works. She traveled as long as her health allowed, visiting Whalley and his second wife in the Mendips, and again visited Hannah More. In Bristol, she visited Emmeline and Maria Edgeworth, Honora’s stepdaughters.

Seward was considered a “very staunch friend” by Robert Southey, who initiated their correspondence by asking for suggestions for his work Madoc. Along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Seward considered Southey one of the great new voices in poetry. In 1799, her correspondence with Sir Walter Scott began. Inspired by his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Seward wrote Auld Willie’s Farewell, included by Scott in the third volume of his Minstrelsy. He was to serve as Seward’s literary executor, editing her poetry. Her letters were brought out by Constable.

In her last lonely years, she had a companion in Miss Fern, a woman in straitened circumstances, in whom Seward found comfort and solace. Seward died of scorbutic fever on March 25, 1809, and is buried in Lichfield Cathedral.

Significance

Anna Seward, acclaimed as a poet in her day—the European Magazine published her biography in 1782—slipped into obscurity as the nineteenth century progressed and the taste for aesthetics waned. Her poetical novel Louisa anticipated Romanticism. Along with Charlotte Smith and others, Seward has been recognized as instrumental in the eighteenth century’s revival of the sonnet. Comparatively little has been written about Seward, and her legacy awaits reevaluation.

Bibliography

Ashmun, Margaret. The Singing Swan. 1931. Reprint. New York: Greenwood Press, 1968. Ashmun’s work remains the only complete biography of Seward.

Fay, Elizabeth. “Anna Seward, the Swan of Lichfield: Reading Louisa.” In Approaches to Teaching British Women Poets of the Romantic Period, edited by Stephen C. Behrendt and Harriet Kramer Linkin. New York: Modern Language Association, 1997. Evaluates Seward’s poetical novel.

Kelly, Jennifer, ed. Bluestocking Feminism: Writings of the Bluestocking Circle, 1738-1785. London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999. The fourth volume of this multivolume series includes Seward’s writings.

Monk, Samuel. “Anna Seward and the Romantic Poets: A Study in Taste.” In Wordsworth and Coleridge: Studies in Honor of George McLean Harper, edited by Earl Leslie Griggs. New York: Russell & Russell, 1962. Monk discusses Seward as a transitional figure.