Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century by Claudia Thomas Kairoff (review)

Early in the introduction to this very fine book, Claudia Thomas Kairoff offers the following hostage to fortune: “It is tempting to describe [Anna] Seward as marginal owing to her liminal status at the close of one literary period as another opened” (p. 3). Of course such a transitional moment is visible only after the fact, and what Kairoff shows with utter plausibility is Seward’s centrality to the mature flowering of eighteenth-century sensibility and the construction of a mode of personalized criticism by which the writer seeks, and finds, a unique place in the world of letters. Over the past twenty or so years, as female writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have migrated from the sphere of “women writers” to a more integrated position within the canon, Seward has lagged a bit behind, say, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, or Felicia Hemans, not to mention those who never quite dropped off the radar (though they languished on its outer edge) like Maria Edgeworth and Frances Burney. With the publication in 2009 of Teresa Barnard’s informed and intelligent biography, Anna Seward: A Constructed Life, however, Seward became accessible beyond the stereotype of the “Swan of Lichfield” (much as Loraine Fletcher’s 1998 Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography did to underpin Smith studies). Kairoff’s study takes us from an understanding of Seward’s life to a much fuller, more nuanced, and above all critical understanding of her works, by which I mean she treats Seward seriously, as a serious writer whose work matters to our understanding of literary history and to her own time’s grasp of the importance of the cultural standing of literary matters.

Kairoff forgoes the usual structure of four or five meaty and lengthy chapters in favor of a comprehensive examination of Seward’s poetry, prose, criticism, and letters. Her twelve chapters allow readers to understand Seward’s contributions to the literary societies of Batheaston and Lichfield; to the genre of political poetry and the construction of a new kind of patriotism following Britain’s defeat in the American Revolution; and to the country’s selection of its preferred bards and canonical poets. Kairoff delves into Seward’s creative evolution of genres themselves (her self-nominated “poetical novel”) and her appreciation of the interplay between the rise of regionalism and the creation of nationalism. She demonstrates Seward’s confidence in poetic pronouncement-making and her willingness to champion writers through critically informed approbation, as well as her courage in taking a stance against the rapid canonization of Samuel Johnson. Kairoff is clear-eyed in her treatment of Seward’s mistakes: over the authenticity of Ossian, for instance, in which Seward was certainly not alone and which Kairoff, crucially, attributes not to gendered perceptual limitations but rather to Seward’s sense of literariness. Thankfully, Kairoff finally gets behind the many dismissive references to Seward’s open dislike of Smith by going back to the source—in this case the letters in full rather than selectively quoted—and contextualizing Seward’s critiques in the light of a cultural tussle over the nature of the sonnet and its connection to an understanding of the literature/nationalism matrix. It is nothing short of refreshing to see Seward’s criticisms read as evidence of her seriousness over literary standards rather than the late eighteenth-century equivalent of a “girl-fight.” Given a history of criticism that always has sought to see the disputes between, for instance, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey over housekeeping as evidence of deep and serious poetic rifts, it is absolutely necessary to examine Seward’s critiques objectively, whether or not one agrees with her evaluation of Smith.

Kairoff shows how Seward, once we agree to accept her as a serious player in the literary culture of the period, is as central as Smith, although in different ways. Since that literary culture can easily accommodate more than...