Anna Seward (1742-1809)
Poet, Biographer, Critic, Letter Writer.
Born 1742; died 1809. Active 1776-1806 in England, Britain, Europe
Article contributed by Harriet Devine, Edge Hill
Celebrated in her lifetime as “the Swan of Lichfield”, Anna Seward was born in Eyam, in Derbyshire, where her father Thomas Seward was Rector. Her mother Elizabeth, nйe Hunter, was the daughter of the headmaster of Lichfield Grammar School, where Samuel Johnson had been a pupil. She was the only surviving child of four: a sister and a brother died in infancy, and her younger sister Sarah in 1764. Her most intense feelings were reserved for her adopted sister, Honora Sneyd. Nine years younger than Anna, she came to live with the Sewards as a child and remained in their household for thirteen years.
In 1750 her father became Canon of Lichfield Cathedral, and four years later the family moved into the Bishop’s Palace, where Anna was to remain for the rest of her life. Her father, “a genteel, well-bred dignified clergyman” with literary leanings (he edited a ten-volume edition of the Works of the Elizabethan playwrights Beaumont and Fletcher, which was published in 1750) educated her at home. He also encouraged her early attempts at writing poetry, as did Dr Erasmus Darwin, a family friend and local physician. Her mother, however, “threw cold water on the rising fires” of her literary aspirations. Although she had numerous suitors, she never married, and took on the responsibility of caring for her increasingly ailing father after her mother’s death in 1780.
In 1773 Honora Sneyd married Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Although Honora had returned to her own father’s house two years earlier, Anna was devastated by her marriage, and mourned her loss in numerous sonnets (“Affection is repaid by causeless hate! /A plighted love is changed to cold disdain!”). Despite their estrangement, she was deeply grieved by Honora’s death, of consumption, in 1780.
Although she had evidently been writing poetry for several years, her earliest published work was “A Rural Coronation”, a “Commendatory Verse” appended to Francis N. C. Mundy’s Needwood Forest (1776). She became a member of Anna, Lady Miller’s literary and poetic circle at Bath-Easton in Somerset: her Poem to the Memory of Lady Miller was published in 1782. By this time she had established herself as a successful poet, largely on the basis of her Elegy on Captain Cook (1780), which had reached its fourth edition by 1784. Her Monody on the Unfortunate Major Andrй(1781) was also a success, though it led her into some controversy. Andrй, an early suitor of Honora Sneyd, had been executed as a spy in the American War, and the poem’s attack on “remorseless Washington” caused the American president to send a defensive message to Seward a few years later. Her own favourite work was Louisa: A Poetical Novel in Four Epistles. First published in 1784, this had entered its fifth edition by 1792.
Although she visited London rarely, she was a prominent member of Lichfield’s intellectual circle, and knew many of the literary, artistic and scientif
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First published 27 November 2002
