CHAPTER SIX
Seward and Sensibility
Louisa, a Poetical Novel, in Four Epistles
In 1784, two years after publishing her elegy to Lady Miller, Seward published her most popular work. Louisa, a Poetical Novel, in Four Epistles went through five editions between its first appearance and 1792, not including an additional fifth edition published in Philadelphia in 1789. The story was calculated to attract and instruct an audience accustomed to admiring keen sensibility, and so in this chapter, I look at it in relation to the cult of sensibility and assess its place amid a body of literature exploring the consequences of sentiment. We have already witnessed Seward’s ability to re-create Captain Cook and Major André as models of heroic sentiment. Instead of intervening in national politics, however, Seward explores domestic politics in the tangled familial plot of her novel. She also suggests the relative values of sensibility and the economic concerns driving British social relations, including marriage. She does so while revising the work of four predecessors, each of whom might be considered a chosen mentor or literary father: Pope, Rousseau, Milton and Prior. Seward chiefly reworks Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard (1714) and Rousseau’s Julie; ou, La nouvelle Heloïse (1761), which appeared in an English translation as Eloisa shortly after its publication in French, to create a heroine who is not consumed by passion like either of those heroines but is rather a modern British woman of sense as well as sensibility. Her compression of a lengthy prose novel into a relatively brief quartet of poems assists her effort to contain the destructive passions motivating many heroes and heroines of sensibility. Conversely, by stretching Pope’s couplet verses to novel length, she develops a plot that dissipates much of the explosive passion that consumes Eloisa, revising the concept of sensibility from a positive, feminine perspective. This chapter concentrates on the first of Louisa’s four epistles, in which Seward blends a poem (Eloisa) and a novel (Julie), a combination that demands scrutiny. Louisa expands our perception of the novel’s late-century development even though Seward’s experiment did not inspire emulation.
Louisa attracted wide notice and critical attention both laudatory and deprecatory. The novel’s—or more properly, novella’s—reception resembled in miniature that of the “blockbuster” that inspired Seward, Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Julie. In the case of Louisa, however, we have almost lost the keys that once enabled readers to engage the poem with rapture. Simultaneously, we have lost in the poem a valuable gloss on or literary key to mid-eighteenth century values and tensions as well as a link in the history of the novel. That key is sensibility. To a reader unprepared to accept sensibility as the guiding principle of Seward’s tale, Louisa will appear to be little more than “description, with interpolations of apostrophe and other forms of maundering which appeal but slightly to the reader of today” (Ashmun 125). As usual, biographer Margaret Ashmun proved unwilling to reconstruct the context of Seward’s work, even for her best-known publication. Seventy-five years ago, sensibility had evidently been consigned to oblivion, gravely if not fatally obscuring many eighteenth-century artistic productions. Thankfully, the past twenty years have restored sensibility to prominence as the century’s dominant theory of human behavior. Once dismissed, following the lead of Romantic-era writers who disowned it, sensibility has again been recognized as a pervasive influence, motivating social movements, including philanthropy and companionate marriage, as well as personal behaviors, such as refined manners and sympathy for the oppressed and suffering members of society.
G. J. Barker-Benfield has located the emergence of sensibility as cultural paradigm in the writings of George Cheyne, whose publications during the 1720s and 1730s popularized the theoretical connection between the nervous system and moral responses to experience, building on the theories of Newton and Locke (6–15). Barker-Benfield consequently agrees with George S. Rousseau and others that sensibility, the belief that the nervous system conveys perceptions to the brain or soul, which reacts according to a person’s degree of refinement, captured popular awareness in the 1740s (6) after Samuel Richardson based the psychology of Clarissa’s characters on Cheyne’s theories (16–17). In Cato’s Tears, Julie Ellison disputes Barker-Benfield’s time line, discovering in such Restoration tragedies as Venice Preserv’d the positive depiction of masculine sentiment, portrayed as the personal and domestic antidote to callous political maneuvers. But whether Ellison’s or Barker-Benfield’s chronology is preferred, there is little dispute that by the mid-eighteenth century, sensibility reigned as the chief factor understood to motivate human behavior. Some human beings were privileged by refined nervous systems to respond more quickly and sensitively to environmental stimuli, and these beings were understood to be superior to other more obtuse people, whose hardened nerves made them more or less oblivious to much of what they encountered. Literary heroes and heroines, such as Clarissa and Parson Yorick, tended to emerge, like Louisa, from the former class.
Before examining Louisa from the perspective of sensibility, we should recall that sensibility was a gendered construction. Sensibility’s gendered identity has, however, been disputed since John Mullan’s influential Sentiment and Sensibility traced its first manifestations as a trait of men privileged and refined enough to weep over the plight of those less fortunate to its eventual condemnation as the weakness of debilitated women.1 Barker-Benfield argues that despite George Cheyne’s definitive autobiographical writings, sensibility was usually associated with the feminine, which explains its connections with refinement, consumerism, companionate marriage, and other trends that made social life less brutal and more comfortable for women throughout the century. Claudia Johnson, in turn, has questioned both Mullan’s and Barker-Benfield’s accounts. She argues forcefully in Equivocal Beings that sensibility was always gendered masculine and that its consequences functioned not to empower women but to put them in their (domestic) place. Moreover, while men’s displays of feeling were usually regarded as the effusions of refined beings, women’s sensibility was stigmatized as debility or at best as inferior to men’s (14). Women were thus, according to Johnson, reduced either to exhibiting a lower order of misguided sensibility or to eschewing sensibility and assuming behaviors once associated with men, hence becoming “equivocal beings” (12). Johnson traces this dichotomy through the writings of Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, and Austen, but her argument suggests that one would do well to exercise caution in assessing Seward’s apparent endorsement of sensibility in Louisa.
Sensibility, then, as a theory regarding the motivation behind human behavior, emerged gradually during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries but burst into full public consciousness in the 1740s, remaining a convincing motivator in fictional characterizations into the nineteenth century despite a growing number of pejorative portraits and critical complaints. Published in 1784, Louisa fell within sensibility’s reign but after its heyday, as its positive connotations were beginning to wear off. In her preface, however, Seward claimed to have written the first 156 lines of the poem when she was nineteen, which would place Louisa closer to the meridian of sensibility’s positive cultural value ([ii]). If indeed Seward began the poetic novel in 1761, the midcentury date helps explain why she chose, aside from wishing to revise Pope, heroic couplets for the tale over the blank verse she would probably have used for a long poem in the 1780s. It also helps clarify the origins of the poem in Seward’s effort to address and correct what she considered the less salutary manifestations of misguided sensibility, such as those portrayed in Pope’s and Rousseau’s books, as well as in Matthew Prior’s “Henry and Emma” (1709). I return several times to Seward’s account of her poem’s late-adolescent inception, but her preface to the poem complicates Johnson’s argument that feminine sensibility was always associated with debility by positing Louisa as the ideal mean between the extremes of “voluptuousness” and “too conceding softness” illustrated by Pope’s Eloisa and Prior’s Emma, respectively. Seward’s decision to represent her heroine as occupying this middle position suggests that while there were manifest dangers associated with sensibility, contemporaries might envision ways its expression exalted rather than degraded young women.
One final aspect of Louisa I want to address as a preliminary is the question of why Seward wrote a verse novel. In an age when prose fictions were evolving to become the dominant form of written entertainment, why did Seward diverge from her most immediate model? La nouvelle Heloïse was remarkable, to contemporaries, as Rousseau’s only novel; why did Seward, whose letters and other nonfiction writings demonstrate her facility in prose, decide against attempting a medium that might have guaranteed a wider, or more lasting, audience for her book? In a superb recent study, G. Gabrielle Starr describes how lyric poetry was absorbed into the early novel. Starr discusses the preference of poets like Pope for the poetic epistle over the lyric as a vehicle for passionate expression (47), although both lyric and epistle forms were often incorporated into early novels. Starr agrees with William Dowling that earlier eighteenth-century writers approved of the epistle partly because it assumed an audience, a community with shared values, rather than vaunted a solipsistic consciousness (Starr 82). Dowling in fact views Eloisa to Abelard and all heroides as exceptions, intimations of women’s isolated circumstances rather than of masculine community (28). But while Starr observes the frequent recourse to epistolary and / or poetic expression in early novels, and Dowling describes the eventual ascendancy of Eloisa to Abelard as a reflection of the “mysterious depths in the consciousness of the beholder” (168), neither addresses the possibility of an heroic epistle absorbing a novel, rather than the other way around, or driving a fictional plot rather than invariably remaining the token of solipsism. Seward’s appears to have been a unique attempt, understandable in that her chosen medium for artistic expression was verse rather than prose. Louisa is the product of an era when the novel form was still in flux, and readers might have been drawn by the sheer novelty of two fused genres, not to mention by the pleasure they continued to derive from poetry. Starr is adamant about the need for greater flexibility in considering the flux of materials out of which the novel emerged. Seward’s verse novel—which I refer to as both poem and novel in the course of this chapter—grew from her decision to answer Rousseau while also refining his model, Pope, an experiment worth mention in histories of the novel. At the same time, Seward claims the assumption of community for the heroic epistle: because Louisa sends her despairing letter not to her inaccessible lover but to a sympathetic female friend, her plight is ameliorated.
As she often did in her career, Seward chose to bend an Odyssean bow, or rather, three bows, in adapting Pope’s, Prior’s, and Rousseau’s texts. Pope’s fictional letter from the lovelorn nun to her former lover remained popular throughout the century, confirming the poet as an early proponent of sensibility rather than, as he was later viewed, an exemplar of the “age of reason.” Seward, who metaphorically quarreled with her predecessor as often as she emulated him, invited comparison with his heroine, with Eloisa’s setting, and with her responses to personal crisis. Seward wished to refine what she perceived as indelicate in Eloisa, whose “impassion’d fondness” (Louisa preface [i]) had led her to abandon her reputation and, worse, jeopardize her soul. Eloisa, then, illustrated the kind of depraved, sensual response that Claudia Johnson believes characterized the century’s view of women’s sensibility. On the other hand, Prior’s Emma represented an equally debased alternative. In that heroine’s credulous belief in her fiancé’s tale of his (fictional) disgrace, and her instantaneous offer to accompany him into exile, Seward detected a mindless response that maintained personal integrity but equally abdicated self-respect in favor of affection. Both heroines exemplified the dangers posed by innocence, the bane of heroines from Clarissa to Evelina and beyond. Against those dangers Seward posited the value of self-respect, which enables her heroine—as isolated and abandoned as Eloisa, as unsuspecting as Emma, and as ardent as both—to resist her impulse to commit suicide and to moderate her outrage while justly condemning Eugenio for his desertion. While young women are peculiarly vulnerable to betrayal owing to their enforced innocence, Seward suggests that dignity is possible under all circumstances and is indeed sometimes necessary for survival. Her position, while arguable, revises Johnson’s contention that sensibility was always condemned in women; at least by Seward in the 1780s, self-possession was deemed not only compatible with but indispensable to sensibility in young ladies. Seward acknowledges Pope’s and Prior’s heroines of sensibility but assimilates their characteristics into her new, positive model of feminine sensibility.
Surely it was this revision of beloved images into a modern, correct, and fashionable vision of feminine sensibility that enchanted early readers. As Jean Mars-den has shown in The Re-Imagined Text, mid-eighteenth century readers and audiences manifested their reverence for Shakespeare not by consuming his plays in as pristine a form as possible but by embracing adaptations by David Garrick and others (75–102). Marsden observes that Garrick’s adaptations, mostly performed and published in the 1750s, mark the boundary after which increasing reverence for Shakespeare rendered interference with his texts a profanation. But Seward conceived her novel at a time when adaptation was still very much an accepted tribute. By creating a character incorporating the passion and sensitivity of Eloisa and Emma but omitting Eloisa’s recklessness and Emma’s dogged, not to say spaniel-like, devotion, Seward re-presented for contemporaries two well-known but unrefined heroines. Archetypes of sensibility but in many ways archaic, Eloisa and Emma needed adaptation in order to reinstate Pope’s and Prior’s forceful portrayals of feminine devotion as viable patterns of sensibility. Seward’s gesture, then, revisioned as well as revised Pope and Prior for her readers, validating the heroic nature of exceptional passion while intimating that powerful emotion can be controlled by morality and self-respect. As Seward explained in her preface, Louisa’s “sensibilities … know no bounds, except those which the dignity of conscious Worth, and a strong sense of Religion prescribe” ([i]). Her project was both daring, in its wish to improve the work of two acknowledged giants, and a palpable act of devotion.
I briefly recount Louisa’s plot because the verse novel long ago lost its readership and indeed has rarely been discussed even by scholars of sensibility. In its first epistle, Louisa, the eponymous heroine, confides to her absent friend Emma that her brother Lorenzo, visiting for the summer after finishing Oxford, brought home his best friend, Eugenio, son of a wealthy mercantile family. Louisa and Eugenio fell in love and, with Lorenzo’s blessing, became engaged. At the end of the summer, the three part; Lorenzo heads off for the grand tour and Eugenio goes home for a visit with his family before establishing himself in the family business in advance of his marriage. Louisa, deeply smitten, pines for Eugenio for several months before, to her horror, reading in the newspaper of his marriage to a wealthy heiress. She perceives herself to be dying of grief and fears that her brother might challenge Eugenio to a duel when he learns her fiancé’s perfidy. In the next letter, Eugenio writes in turn to Emma explaining his mysterious desertion. He betrayed Louisa because his father, on the verge of bankruptcy, begged him to save his family by marrying the hugely dowered and audaciously flirtatious Emira. Eugenio’s action resulted from the tragic necessity of choosing between two evils: he believed that Louisa might recover from her grief, especially if outraged by his supposed callousness, but his family would certainly be destroyed by financial ruin. Louisa responds to Emma’s news in the third epistle by resolving to live, knowing that Eugenio is not a base traitor but in fact made an honorable decision that she must commend despite its consequences. The novel’s final epistle, from Louisa to Emma, relates the outcome of Eugenio’s marriage. Ernesto, Eugenio’s father, appears in Louisa’s bower and whisks her away in his coach to Emira’s deathbed. En route, he describes the misery caused by Eugenio’s marriage of convenience. Knowing herself his second choice, Emira deserted Eugenio for a life of debauchery, rejecting even their infant daughter as the product of a loveless union. Unfortunately, her scandalous carousings exposed her to a fatal illness. Emira’s last wish is for Louisa’s forgiveness and her promise to raise Emira’s and Eugenio’s child. When Louisa arrives, Emira confesses that not only was she aware of Eugenio’s love for Louisa when she courted him but also that she did so because his love for another piqued her competitive pride. Louisa consents to raise her child and forgives Emira. Louisa concludes by inviting Emma to join her and Eugenio, since Emira’s death has ensured their impending marriage.
Contemporaries responded warmly to a novel that sanctioned a nearly fatal degree of emotional response if buttressed by conventional principles and a firm sense of personal worth. By the time Seward published Louisa, numerous sentimental fictions had already appeared cautioning men and women against excessive passion while simultaneously devoting many pages to the re-creation of feelings. Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1763), Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), and Henry MacKenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) are but the most famous among novels that privilege the relation of emotional responses to experience over the description of incidents. Seward was perhaps being disingenuous when she declared in her preface that Louisa had “little chance to be popular.… An Imagination that glows, while the Heart is frozen, has a propensity to fancy every thing prosaic which is not imagery, and will probably yawn over the reasoning of these Lovers, and sicken over their tenderness” ([ii]). A generation that had sobbed throughout Clarissa’s account of her demise and that would shortly devour the English translation of Goethe’s Sorrows of Werther (1786) was unlikely to disdain the combination of evocative scenery and baffled passion that characterize Louisa. Since Werther’s anonymous translator would demur in similar terms that “those who expect a Novel will be disappointed in this work,” it is more likely that Seward’s disclaimer made a claim for her novel, identifying Louisa as part of a popular subset, the novel of sensibility (v). At the time, her achievement must have delighted readers who recognized familiar if old-fashioned poetic heroines refined into a model for fashionable young ladies.
What supplied the immediate impetus to Seward to compose Louisa seems to have been the publication in 1761 of Eloisa, the English translation of Rousseau’s La nouvelle Heloïse. Seward would have known “Julie” as “Eloisa” because Rousseau’s anonymous translator changed her name to prevent confusion (1:v–vi; I try to avoid confusion by referring to Rousseau’s heroine as “Julie”). While in her introduction to Seward’s poems for the Bluestocking Feminism series, Jennifer Kelly cites “transcending passion of the kind found in Rousseau” as the model for Louisa’s characterization, Seward’s correspondence suggests she was more concerned to correct than to replicate Rousseau’s version of “high-minded passion” (xviii). Among the poems she bequeathed to Walter Scott, Seward included some early fictional letters to a correspondent she calls “Emma” that witness her youthful critical powers. The letters suggest that Seward herself was the model for Louisa, who likewise addresses an Emma in her fictional epistles.2 The Emma of the letters, however, was the recipient of Seward’s strictures on Rousseau, whose novel she was reading when Seward composed the first of her extant replies. “You talked of reading the New Eloisa,” she added in a terse postscript; “throw it aside, I beseech you” (Poetical Works 1:xlvii). Her next letter explains that she objects to Eloisa’s “softening tendency,” by which she apparently means the glorification of romantic passion to a degree that might provide a salutary example to the “vain and selfish hearts” of society ladies but endangers most young women whose tender hearts are already too susceptible (Poetical Works 1:xlviii). Seward’s analysis reveals that Emira was designed to supplement Eloisa by presenting young ladies in “high life” with an image of “love, in its most enthusiastic excess” with “no hazard to principle and to happiness so desperate as pride; boundless dissipation and unprincipled extravagance being in their train” (Poetical Works 1:xlix). Emira illustrates Seward’s psychology of desperate pride; she resorts to “habits of sensuality” that “once established” make the heart go “cold and impenetrable amidst the indelicate indulgence of the senses” and cause it to lose “all power of sympathizing truly and equally” (Poetical Works 1:l).
But while Emira is constructed as a warning to those whose passions are frozen by pride, Louisa and Eugenio counter Rousseau’s Julie and St. Preux as acceptably didactic models of passion. Julie’s marriage to Wolmar becomes Eugenio’s marriage to Emira, for example, so that Louisa fulfills the era’s preferred ideal of chaste feminine attachment: it is given only once, even if lifelong celibacy should be the consequence. Louisa’s passion, while as deep as Julie’s, is not reckless. While St. Preux suffers “the horrid temptation … to plunge into [the lake’s] waters with a mistress, irrecoverably lost to his hopes” (Poetical Works 1:lxv), Louisa momentarily contemplates suicide but immediately heeds the cautions of a guardian angel to desist. Eugenio’s inconstancy is merely apparent; he pledges his platonic devotion to his beloved despite a marriage engineered by his father and bride. On the other hand, he assiduously fulfills his marriage vows, siring a child and forswearing all contact with Louisa. While St. Preux contemplates desperate measures, Eugenio responds to his wife’s adultery with the sober reflection that his coldness was partly responsible for her delinquency. Although Seward delighted in Rousseau’s emotive and descriptive powers, she feared his examples of “transcending passion,” and Louisa may have been inspired by her desire to create comparable but less dangerous models of sensibility: English models as opposed to Rousseau’s continental figures. Seward’s wish to clarify what in Rousseau appeared “labyrinths of sophistry” in which “the distinctions of right and wrong are blended and lost” may have been pedantic, but her audacity produced a novel with wide appeal (Poetical Works 1:lxiii).
Seward’s impulse, at nineteen, to revise La nouvelle Heloïse was indeed audacious. Rousseau’s novel had recently captivated readers throughout Europe.3 The first English translation appeared only two months after the book’s French publication; there were to be ten English editions in addition to seventy-two editions in French by 1800 (McDowell 2). The 156 lines Seward first drafted indicate some of her general responses, positive and negative, to La nouvelle Heloïse in addition to revising the plot and characterizations in specific ways. Rousseau’s plot recreates that of the medieval Abelard and Heloïse in plausible modern terms. St. Preux is not a middle-aged cleric but the youthful son of bourgeois parents. Engaged by her mother to tutor Julie d’Étange, a young noblewoman, he falls in love and gradually musters the courage to communicate his passion by letter. Julie admits her corresponding devotion but the consummation of their affair is delayed by the omnipresence of her mother and St. Preux’s other pupil, her cousin Claire. Eventually, however, the lovers embark on a clandestine romance that is constantly endangered by the possibility of detection and the vengeance that would follow of Julie’s father, Baron d’Étange, who is determined that his daughter (and sole surviving child) will marry only a fellow aristocrat. Aided by Claire, however, the lovers prolong their affair for several years despite intermittent separations, until their secret is compromised and they must part before Julie’s reputation is destroyed. Julie reluctantly consents to St. Preux’s virtual exile to England under the patronage of the lovers’ confidant, Lord Bomston, and to marriage with Monsieur Wolmar, her father’s chosen suitor. Wolmar proves a generous husband despite knowledge of Julie’s previous attachment; he eventually befriends St. Preux, who resumes his now-chaste dedication to Julie before her untimely death after rescuing her son from the icy waters of Lake Geneva.
No summary so brief could encapsulate Rousseau’s novel, which includes numerous philosophical digressions and detailed descriptions of the lovers’ emotions as well as the responses of all their acquaintances. Despite the unauthorized and clandestine nature of their attachment, however, Julie and St. Preux are admired by all but her father for their intense devotion to one another. Rousseau, as Judith McDowell has observed, introduced a fresh conception of virtue as adherence to one’s deepest impulses (16). He granted unprecedented importance to the passions and consequently to those heroes of sensibility who remain true to their passions despite all obstacles. Hugh Blair would include such characters in his description of the sentimental sublime in 1783: “On some occasions, where virtue either has no place, or is but imperfectly displayed, yet if extraordinary vigour and force of mind be discovered, we are not insensible to a degree of grandeur in the character” (215). Julie and St. Preux are extolled by their circle not because they eventually bow to social necessity. They are admired for the depth and intensity of their attachment even though it led to transgression followed by mutual self-sacrifice. Julie’s death conforms to contemporary fictional demands that a fallen heroine had to die to atone for her crime. To this extent, Rousseau himself was willing to satisfy conventional expectations. But unlike the heroines of early “she tragedies” or even Clarissa, Julie dies surrounded by loving and admiring family members who regard her as exemplary rather than as a reformed sinner. What would the nineteen-year-old daughter of an Anglican clergyman have made of Rousseau’s emphasis on the passions? Of his suggestion that emotional attachment can achieve a level of sublimity and is thus admirable on its own terms apart from social, or even conventional moral, considerations? The opening lines of Louisa convey Seward’s intention to craft an alternative British version of Rousseau’s plot, one based on British precedents but that remained mindful of her great predecessor across the channel.
Julie and St. Preux are paradoxically doomed by the very passion that exalts them. Love leads them to rationalize their affair and into numerous situations that endanger both themselves and their principal confidants. Claire, for example, is peacefully resigned to marrying her parents’ chosen suitor. But once apprised of her cousin’s liaison, she devotes herself to managing the lovers’ trysts, even recruiting her fiancé to assist their affair. Seward evidently found Claire’s role as go-between distasteful; Julie’s cousin should not have sanctioned, let alone facilitated, her illicit relationship. Rousseau’s young people enjoy a level of autonomy Seward evidently found unrealistic given the social structure that eventually prevents the lovers’ marriage. The first change Seward made to his plot was to separate Louisa from her confidante, Emma, who is thus reduced to a more limited role. Emma has been in India for four years while her family attends to their business. Her exile places Louisa’s action firmly in the modern British world of mercantile imperialism rather than in the enclosed world of Rousseau’s Swiss lovers. By insisting on the recognizably British, commercial context of her love plot, Seward suggests that a New Heloïse for her compatriots needs a setting quite different from that of the remote shores of Lake Geneva. She also suggests that young women possess little autonomy, let alone the ability, to carry on lengthy clandestine love affairs. Modern Britain seems to control its citizens by enforcing distances between them. But Louisa’s distance from Emma is also metaphorical. Alone on her brother’s estate, Louisa has nobody in whom to confide when her lover breaks his engagement. Louisa has no support in her dilemma, possibly mirroring Seward’s recognition of women’s emotional isolation. If young women were neither instructed about nor expected to entertain strong feelings, how should they respond when plighted lovers died or decamped? How were they to conduct themselves in such situations, let alone when drawn toward an affair such as Rousseau describes?
Seward revised Pope’s and Rousseau’s heroines and their situations. Louisa is not a middle-aged nun lamenting her wasted youth and misplaced vows, as in Pope’s epistle. She is not described as noble or beautiful like Rousseau’s Julie is; in fact, we know little about her social station or appearance. Instead of a tyrannical uncle or father, Louisa appears to have only her beloved brother, whom she describes as “the youthful master of this quiet vale” (1:80). Unlike her predecessors, who succumbed to their lovers’ forbidden advances, Louisa’s courtship by Eugenio is approved by her brother, who introduces the couple. After Eugenio’s admiring friendship evolves into professed love, Louisa accepts his proposal, and Lorenzo’s “smiles fraternal hail’d our mutual vows” (1:328). Seward’s description insists that romantic intensity can accompany even such mundane circumstances as a family-sanctioned courtship. She proposes that great passion can coexist with propriety, a concept that Rousseau’s novel seems to deny (Claire and Julie frankly admit their lack of passion for their husbands). Eugenio is, moreover, a perfectly appropriate suitor, Lorenzo’s university friend from a wealthy mercantile family. Theirs is to be a love match between a young woman from a landowning family, although without a large dowry, and a young man whose fortune is assured. Although Louisa is fortunate to secure her handsome, affectionate lover without the large portion his family might have demanded, Seward emphasizes the conventional nature of Louisa’s circumstances before launching into her sorrowful plot.
Although Seward seems from the first to have intended a poem that would recall Rousseau’s readers from their daydreams about impossible, secret love affairs, she clearly admired his ability to convey emotional states through vivid descriptions of setting. In her preface, Seward notes as models Pope’s evocation of Eloisa’s passions through her scenic descriptions and Rousseau’s of St. Preux’s through his description of the landscape of Meillerie as it appeared to him when one winter, he was lamenting his separation from Julie and when years later, he escorts her there with her husband’s permission on a summer afternoon. Rousseau’s description evocatively projects the seasonal features of a sublime terrain onto his hero’s states of mind; St. Preux’s passion resembles the Alpine scenery both in its winter harshness and summer fertility, depending on his mood. Seward both emulates her predecessors’ techniques and refines them. Louisa is almost entirely defined by her setting, the “bower” in which she sits awaiting Lorenzo’s visit while singing and accompanying herself on a lute. Unlike Pope’s Eloisa, who thinks of herself as imprisoned and consequently describes herself trapped in a chapel, a cell, or a crypt, and unlike Julie, who evades supervision in her parents’ and relatives’ homes among other places, Louisa is found outdoors. She never alludes to a house, and we never hear of parents, guardians, maids or anyone who might control her behavior. The bower is evidently her favorite spot: Seward places her there like Eve or like a classical heroine within a single setting: a small, enclosed space at the base of a cliff that terminates her brother’s garden.
Seward’s immediate response to La nouvelle Heloïse, as we have seen, was to revise Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard, an English version of the history that inspired Rousseau. Her poem cleverly evoked both her English and French models while correcting them according to her own notions of propriety and realism. If she indeed completed the novel upon rediscovering her draft in 1782, as her preface claims, the 156-line fragment she found provided the characters and plot for a story both laden with sensibility and more plausible to the broad swath of middle-rank British fiction readers. Louisa, as she describes herself, is both at liberty and self-constrained by deference to her brother and attachment to her bower. Her circumstances might have appealed to readers who would have envied her autonomy while recognizing in Louisa’s near-stasis the bounded nature of most British ladies’ lives. Seward, however, had several reasons for identifying Louisa with a single setting. Distilling Rousseau’s sprawling novel into a poetic novel of fewer than one hundred pages required numerous reductions in scale. Characters, incidents, descriptions—all had to be compressed into four epistles of between four hundred and five hundred lines each. Seward chose to exploit her favorite scenes from Pope and Rousseau by maintaining her focus on Louisa within her bower. As Paul Goring has observed, novels of sensibility invite scrutiny of characters in given situations by tending toward the highly theatrical in their descriptions (153). By observing heroes’ and heroines’ physical responses as well as overhearing, as it were, their thoughts, readers learned to emulate the reactions of sensibility. Seward had clearly studied the techniques of masters such as Richardson; like his Pamela and Clarissa, Louisa is not merely an overheard consciousness, writing to the moment, but a visible participant in the drama of her courtship and desertion.
Seward composed her description of Louisa’s bower with glances toward both her predecessors. Pope’s Eloisa complains from the outset that her convent’s “relentless walls” enclose “rugged rocks” and “grots and caverns shagged with horrid thorn” (ll. 19–20). Eloisa specifies that the convent’s appearance reflects her personal melancholy, which “saddens all the scene,/Shades ev’ry flow’r, and darkens ev’ry green,/Deepens the murmur of the falling floods,/And breathes a browner horror on the woods” (ll. 165, 167–70). Early in Eloisa, St. Preux evokes a similar scene to convey his misery. Exiled in the mountains above Julie’s home, he confesses to her that
the horrors of [my location] are increased by the gloomy succession of ideas ever present to my imagination .… It is dark; it is dreadful, then it suits the habit of my soul; and a more pleasant prospect of nature, would reflect little comfort on the dreary view within me. A ridge of barren rocks surrounds the coast, and my dwelling is still made more dismal by the uncomfortable face of winter. And yet, [Julie], I am sensible enough that if I were once forced to abandon you, I should stand in need of no other abode, no other season. (1:73)
Both Eloisa and St. Preux manifest the exquisite sensitivity to their surroundings that marks the heroes and heroines of sensibility. Both find in such natural phenomena as seasonal weather reflections of their own states of mind. They observe landscape features that resemble their personal misery: Eloisa’s environment is rugged, horrid, and sad, while St. Preux’s is gloomy, dreadful, dreary, and barren. Their perceived connection with the natural world demonstrates their sensibility, their spontaneous, nervous reactions to environments that affect, even as they reflect and deepen, already pensive moods.
One particular episode in Rousseau’s novel inspired Seward’s creation of Louisa’s setting. After he and Julie have been separated for years, St. Preux takes her for a summer outing to Meillerie, site of his former distress. In this season, his “solitary seat formed a wild and desert nook, but full of those sorts of beauties, which are only agreeable to susceptible minds, and appear horrible to others” (3:162). Although surrounded by glaciers and dark forests, the spot no longer seems desolate but instead reminds St. Preux of sufferings now past. The clearing to which he leads Julie suggests the small metaphorical space that is permitted to their emotional bond:
In the midst of these noble and superb objects, the little spot where we were, displayed all the charms of an agreeable and rural retreat; small floods of water filtered through the rocks, and flowed along the verdure in chrystal streams. Some wild fruit trees leaned their heads over ours; the cool and moist earth was covered with grass and flowers. Comparing this agreeable retreat with the objects which surrounded us, one would have thought that this desert spot was designed as an asylum for two lovers, who alone had escaped the general wreck of nature. (3:163)
St. Preux attempts to convey the misery he formerly experienced in this spot, but, unfortunately, Julie insists they withdraw from a place so charged with their youthful passion. Both lovers understand that the refuge is illusory; its edenic fruit trees and crystal streams are literally hemmed in by forbidding crevasses and crags. They must withdraw to preserve not only their memories of past love but their precariously achieved adult respectability. To underline the scene’s sense of a paradise lost, St. Preux concludes his account with a description of his subsequent despair and temptation to plunge with Julie into Lake Geneva as they are rowed from Meillerie. He recovers, however, and regards his and Julie’s refusal to succumb either to renewed passion or to despair as a triumph of virtue (3:166–67).
Writing to her imaginary friend in 1763, Seward praised this letter as one of three in the novel she thought “not … excelled by any thing I have read” (Poetical Works 1:lxiv). “St Preaux’ [sic] solemn apostrophe to Eloisa [sic] is striking past expression,” she exclaimed. “How we tremble for them both” (Poetical Works 1:lxiv). She particularly admired the concluding scene, with its “mutual and final conflicts, in the boat, of a passion with so much difficulty vanquished!” (Poetical Works 1:lxv). When, twenty-one years later, she returned to her novel, Seward capitalized on Louisa’s initial setting, recognizing its potential for the kind of emotional reflection imagined by Eloisa and St. Preux. We first see Louisa in medias res, writing to Emma in the aftermath of her desertion by Eugenio. The bower where she sits to write little resembles the scene of summer courtship. It is now late autumn, and the glade offers but a “thin shelter” (1:38). Louisa’s description recalls features of both Eloisa’s and St. Preux’s environments:
Unequal steps, and rising sighs, disclose
The thorny pressure of tyrannic woes;
And where th’ incumbent Rock, with awful face,
Bends o’er the fountain, gurgling from its base,
And marks the limit of the silent Dell,
Sadly I sit my bosom’d griefs to tell. (1:35–40)
While Eloisa beheld “grots and caverns shagg’d with rugged thorn,” Louisa’s heart is wracked with “thorny pressure.” Like both Eloisa and St. Preux, she seeks a desolate spot congenial to her sorrows. As in Pope’s and Rousseau’s works, an ominous cliff looms over Seward’s setting, closing off the dell much like Louisa’s prospects, terminated by misfortune. Louisa later specifies that she first encountered Eugenio “on this shady bank” (1:85). At that time, the cliff with its spring offered cool protection from the summer heat. The spot, which Louisa explains is the end of a small valley within the estate’s grounds, is her chosen refuge. As such, its features are suggestive as well as emblematic. The enclosed site recalls the Eden described by Seward’s beloved Milton in Paradise Lost; unlike Milton’s garden, however, the bower witnesses not just Louisa’s temptation but also her triumph. Louisa’s bower also resembles the retreat of another of Seward’s favorite poets, the lovelorn Petrarch, whom she knew had retired “to a romantic valley” where the Sorgue river terminates in a “fountain … overshadowed by … summits” (Poetical Works 1:liv). Louisa has chosen a liminal point at the garden’s boundary as her retreat. Its enclosed nature connotes Louisa’s maidenliness as well as her retiring personality; she is on the verge of adulthood yet lingers within the shelter of her brother’s garden. Suggestively, when her brother appears, he “gaily bounded down the glade” (1:105), literally crashing into her bower with an enthusiastic embrace. Thus backed into a corner, so to speak, Louisa first meets the young man who has followed Lorenzo into her sanctuary and who will subsequently deprive her of her peace of mind as well as the happy associations of her beloved retreat.
Seward thus supplies Louisa with the equivalent of Pope’s Paraclete and Rousseau’s Meillerie, a space where natural seasonal changes seem uncannily to reflect and exacerbate her changing moods. Like theirs, it is a theatrical space as well. As Goring suggests regarding similar contemporary novels, the bower is designed as a stage on which Louisa performs her sensibility (144). Working within a small compass, Seward sets most of her novel’s action on a single stage, complete with looming rock and bubbling spring for scenery. Although the rock might be construed as a sort of phallic threat towering over Louisa’s virginal enclosure, it also functions simply as a backdrop against which we observe her changing responses from unmediated joy at her brother’s return, to hopeful but chastened attraction to Eugenio, to exultant joy over requited love, to despair after her betrayal. In each case, the attendant woods provide both insight into Louisa’s consciousness, confirming her natural sensitivity, and appropriate changes of scenery. Readers observing her reactions might learn, to apply Goring’s argument to Seward’s novel, from the exemplary Louisa how to conduct themselves in similar trials. Goring’s insight into the didactic function of such theatricalized fiction suggests the seriousness of Seward’s objection to Julie’s “softening tendency”: as a reader who fully appreciated Rousseau’s artful staging of climactic scenes, she worried about his novel’s effect on readers accustomed to emulating the physical responses of admired characters. Louisa is both a swooning exemplar of sensibility and a proper maiden who models resistance to despair, the depths of which are intimated by the bleak surroundings, echoes of faded bliss, that she both frequents and laments.
Louisa’s almost symbiotic relationship with the natural world demonstrates Seward’s attention to literature of sensibility. Louisa exemplifies the keen nervous responses typical of contemporary heroines. Visual impressions mutate into tortured feelings almost as rapidly as they meet her eyes when she surveys her wintry bower: “O ye known objects!—how ye strike my heart!/And vain regrets, with keener force, impart!” (1:47–48). Exceptionally attuned to natural objects, Louisa recalls welcoming her “blooming” brother on the summer afternoon of his fateful return (1:81), and her first impression of Eugenio is not of a distinctively human body but of a form “tall as the Pine, amidst inferior Trees,/With all the bending Ozier’s pliant ease” (1:112–13). Eugenio’s hair even forms a “shade” for his brow like the leaves of a tree (1:114). Sensitive to natural beauty, Louisa reacts immediately to this particularly impressive “tree.” Eugenio, equally impressed, blushes and conveys his admiration with his eyes; Louisa instantly reads in Eugenio’s face the effect of her personal beauty, deciphering “each flattering meaning”: “Sweet, serious, tender, those blue eyes impart / A thousand dear sensations to the heart” (1:117–19). As the courtship progresses, Louisa proves adept at discerning the warmer feelings revealed by Eugenio’s physiology but not by the polite expressions that “Friendship dictates.” While his verbal skills falter, Eugenio speaks eloquently enough with “disorder’d praise,/Scarce half express’d; the musing ardent gaze;/The varying cheek; the frequent smother’d sigh” (1:154–56). Seward claimed to emulate Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard by leaving the lovers’ éclaircissement to her readers’ imagination. But the scene in which Eugenio declares his passion is consistent with the rest of their courtship. Like their first meeting, the occasion reflects its setting in the familiar bower, but at sunset of a summer day. Louisa recalls how “calm on the gilded grass the fountain lay” (1:187) as “the setting Orb emblaz’d the West;/and sunk with splendor” (1:199–200). As soon as Eugenio confides his love, “a calm more sunny o’er my bosom spread!” (1:189), and although she tries to dissemble for modesty’s sake, “from these eyes the sun-bright gladness beam’d,/And all the triumph of my bosom stream’d!” (1:204–5). Not merely reflecting the sunset ambience, Louisa seems transfigured, as if she has become the sun that gilds her bower. Through such descriptions, Seward implies Louisa’s almost uncanny reflexivity. Unfortunately, Louisa’s sensibility will prove nearly fatal when it exacerbates her sorrow after Eugenio’s apparent desertion.
Seward endows her chief characters with a gift that suggested, to contemporaries, the double-edged potential of sensibility for joy and sorrow. Like many heroes and heroines of sensibility, Eugenio and Louisa are especially moved by music, which, as Barker-Benfield observes, had become a metaphor for the transmission of nervous impulses through the sensitive frame (21–23). Eugenio hears Louisa’s “voice, that floated on the waving wind” before he sees her, as she sings verses from Il penseroso, set to music by Handel, and accompanies herself on a lute (1:86). While Louisa comments only on the “presaging” import of the song relative to her own plight, Eugenio is evidently melted by her melancholy tune in true sensible fashion. For her part, Louisa at first registers not Eugenio’s words but the extremely musical quality of his voice:
And when he speaks—not Music’s thrilling pow’r,
No, not the vocal Mistress of the bow’r,
When slow she warbles from the blossom’d spray,
In liquid blandishment, her evening lay,
Such soft insinuating sweetness knows,
As from that voice in melting accents flows! (1:122–27)
In retrospect, as a jilted maid, Louisa represents the dangerous power of music to “thrill” or stir the nerves to an instant response. Music “insinuates” itself into the heart that consequently “melts” before the conscious mind can guard against its power. Louisa defends her credulity as a “primal grace of youth” (1:142), but she is obviously vulnerable not only as a sheltered, inexperienced girl but as a person affected by each sense experience. Seward perhaps designed Lorenzo’s presence as a rational if sympathetic chaperone for two such flammable lovers. Louisa and Eugenio face none of the external obstacles of their predecessors, but Seward was determined not to portray lovers who fall victim to their own appetites. These lovers are achingly aware of their senses, but they will maintain their grasp on propriety at all costs.
Just as Henry Fielding supplied Joseph Andrews and Fanny Goodwill with Parson Adams to guide them home, so Seward, recognizing the importance of responsible mentors for even the most decorous young lovers, supplies Louisa and Eugenio with Lorenzo. Unfortunately, Lorenzo embarks at the end of summer on the grand tour, an event that often, as in this tale, lasted for several years. Propriety is observed, however, and Eugenio leaves the same day for his parents’ estate in Wales. But when, five months later, Louisa learns that Eugenio has jilted her for another bride, she must face alone one of the great moral problems haunting the age of sensibility: the possibility that a person might simulate delicate responses and tender sentiments in order to harm the innocent. Both Henry and Sarah Fielding had explored the general danger of hypocrisy for the sincere, open-hearted individual, in novels such as Joseph Andrews and David Simple, respectively. But the most important novelists had pondered the danger specifically posed by hypocritical men to innocent young women (Barker-Benfield 331–41). From Richardson’s Clarissa to Austen’s Marianne in Sense and Sensibility, writers apportioned various degrees of blame among their seductive heroes and innocent, susceptible heroines. While Louisa is in no danger of seduction, she exemplifies the kind of instant response to the attractive (and apparently good) that frequently deludes heroines in the fiction of the time. Louisa’s first letter returns often to the question, “False could I think that vow, whose starting tear / Sprung, the warm witness of a faith sincere?” (1:258–59). Seward intended her plot’s contemporary details to ensure that young readers both identified with and learned from Louisa’s and Eugenio’s behavior. She not only narrates a conventional courtship but creates a modern setting for Louisa’s trials in keeping with contemporary realistic fiction. Louisa exchanges letters with confidence using the postal delivery system; Eugenio intends to join his family’s mercantile firm before his impending marriage; Louisa reads a daily newspaper, where to her horror she learns about Eugenio’s marriage in a society column. But despite these mundane details, Louisa finds Eugenio’s desertion uncanny, evil. She struggles to comprehend his marriage to a wealthy belle and can only conclude he was motivated by an ambition and covetousness that were not apparent during their courtship.
Her struggle to comprehend brings Louisa to the brink of suicide. Her strong feelings, previously reliable guides to her reason, now seem baffled and uncontrolled. Louisa considers summoning her brother to defend her honor but recoils at the prospect of either duelist’s death. She remembers when Eugenio seemed angelic and blames her own naiveté for her failure to perceive his treacherous nature: “For if Credulity her warmth impart,/With veils of light she screens the selfish Heart” (1:20). Eugenio, once a thriving tree, now reminds Louisa of a deserted church, its aisles haunted by ghosts at midnight. The image suggests to Louisa her own death, and she contemplates ending her misery through suicide. A guardian angel seems to intervene, however, promising that grief over Eugenio’s marriage will prove Louisa’s “sure, tho’ lingering passport to the tomb”; criminal effort on her part will not be required to bring about her death (1:438). Louisa concludes by alerting Emma to her anticipated death and announcing her relief and joy at this resolution.
Throughout the narration of her mental conflict, Louisa’s phrases strongly recall both Eloisa’s and St. Preux’s struggles. Abelard, “bound and bleeding” (l. 100), becomes the specter of Eugenio “pale, and bleeding on the plain” (1:248). Eloisa imagines herself “propt on some tomb,” while “in each low wind methinks a Spirit calls,/And more than Echoes talk along the walls” (ll. 304–6). She then hears the spectral voice that beckons her toward the scene that will resolve her conflict when Abelard witnesses her exemplary death. Eloisa concludes by wishing for Abelard a glorious entry into heaven, where “Saints [will] embrace thee with a love like mine” (l. 342). Louisa borrows Eloisa’s evocation of the crypt for her characterization of Eugenio as a darkened church where “Thro’ the dim Ailes [sic] pale Spectres seem to fleet,/And hollow groans the whispering Walls repeat” (1:399–400). This vision leads to the climax of her struggle, her contemplation of suicide, which is brought to an end like Eloisa’s conflict by a guardian spirit’s intervention. Like Eloisa, Louisa invites a witness to observe her peaceful demise; unlike Eloisa, she denies Eugenio her final thoughts and promises Emma she will wait “to welcome thee to HAPPIER SPHERES!” (1:462). Seward no doubt borrowed the incident of contemplated suicide from St. Preux’s account of his despair and recovery in the boat after his visit with Julie to Meillerie. But Seward refined both her models. Louisa intends to divest herself of thoughts about Eugenio before she dies; only the similarly chaste friend who has never betrayed her will be worthy of her heavenly embrace. And unlike Rousseau, Seward does not presume Louisa alone capable of conquering her suicidal thoughts. St. Preux describes his recovery in terms typical of sensibility: “A gentler sentiment little by little wound its way into my soul; tenderness overcame despair. I began to shed copious tears, and this state, compared to the one I had emerged from, was not without some pleasures. I wept hard and long and was comforted” (3:167). St. Preux describes a process nearly free of reason or volition. His emotions carry him along, from deadly passion to tender, even pleasurable, sentiment. Rousseau, like his hero, endorsed the primacy of the passions. La nouvelle Heloïse suggests confidence in the passions’ ability, at least in the best individuals, to direct human behavior. Louisa embraces a more conventional philosophy. While the passions of innocent and good-hearted people such as Louisa are usually sufficient guides to correct behavior, in extreme situations, humans must rely on divine support. This solution seems a timorous response to the problem of hypocrisy—in essence, Seward is admitting that innocent people will often be victimized because they follow their generous impulses and claiming that God will help them bear the consequences—but it is not very different from the conclusions of contemporaries such as the Fieldings and Goldsmith. Seward’s didacticism and her emphasis on Louisa’s moral growth, typical in realistic fiction of the time, separates this verse novel from other sentimental fiction that, as Ann Jessie Van Sant has observed, subordinate plot and character development to the effort of moving the reader’s sensibility (118–19). Despite Seward’s emphasis on the spectatorial as conveyed by Louisa’s stagelike bower and the description of Emira’s deathbed penitence, she is not interested only in showing scenes that evoke empathy but also in showing Louisa’s growth to maturity.
The lines Seward drafted at nineteen acted as a blueprint for the rest of the first letter. In the tradition of the Ovidian epistle, Seward commences her plot after the heroine’s initial infatuation and desertion. From Louisa’s foreboding salutation, readers know that “for her … Sorrow shrouds / Hope’s crystal mirror with impervious clouds” (1:15–16). When she retrieved the manuscript twenty-one years later, Seward followed clues latent in the fragment to create the story of Louisa’s courtship and betrayal.
Seward not only drew extensively from both Pope and Rousseau for the content of her verse novel but also on Pope’s form. His style lurks behind many of Seward’s beautifully crafted lines: his preference for onomatopoeia, for example, influenced such descriptions as Louisa’s evocation of Emma, wandering “where broad Bananas stretch their grateful shade” (1:6), in which the lengthy “w” and “n” sounds, distinct concluding consonants, and evenly weighted syllables stretch the line to emulate the trees’ protection. Louisa describes herself for Emma as walking toward the bower: “Unequal steps, and rising sighs, disclose / The thorny pressure of tyrannic woes” (1:335–36). The couplet’s first line, with its double caesurae framing rising vowel sounds before the final, low-pitched syllable of “disclose,” beautifully suggests Louisa’s faltering breath. The second line imitates, in its harsh consonantal blends, the metaphorical thorns lacerating her consciousness. Such couplets are frequent throughout the first epistle, evidence of Seward’s technical agility in speeding and slowing lines and in crafting lines that echo sense in sound. Louisa is manifestly intended for reading aloud, another reason it has completely faded, since its effects were designed for an archaic purpose. Seward’s intricate couplets reveal her intention not only to revise but to pay homage to her chief stylistic model.
Seward uses couplets to speed and slow her lines for specific purposes. When the poem opens, for example, Louisa asks Emma to “bend o’er the West thy longing eyes, and chide / The tardy breeze that fans the unfreighted tide” (1:7–8). This bit of exposition, imagining Emma’s disappointment over Louisa’s failure to correspond, moves as quickly as a prose statement. More quickly, in fact: Seward’s use of enjambment, of long vowels, and of “s” and “z” sounds speeds the line, as does the intended elision of “the unfreighted” at the couplet’s close. For dramatic pronouncements, however, Seward reverts to her usual pattern of end-stopped couplets, as when Louisa says hopefully at the end of the first verse paragraph, “And oh! I fondly tell my anxious heart,/The dearest truth experience can impart,/That yet, to quench this sympathy of soul,/Time, and a world of waters, vainly roll” (1:23–26). Louisa’s exclamation interrupts the first line, and her anxiety is communicated when she interjects the second, as if to reassure herself that her faith in Emma’s enduring love is justified. Both the third and fourth lines have double caesuras, which convey Louisa’s faltering confidence by further slowing her pace. The double “w” sounds of “world of waters” stretches the phrase to resemble the Atlantic that separates the friends. Louisa abounds in such effects, which Seward uses both to control the novel’s pace and to convey her characters’ psychological states. In developing the heroic couplet’s potential for characterization beyond that of Pope’s dramatic monologue, Seward may not have revived its popularity, but her use of verse both to unfold plot and elaborate states of consciousness forms a bridge between verse like Pope’s and later developments in the Romantic period. Louisa illustrates the tensions that render Seward a transitional poet. Her emulation of Pope’s couplets and allusions to Eloisa to Abelard look back, but her choice of his passionate epistle looks forward to poets like William Blake, who admired Pope as the inspired bard of Eloisa and the “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady.” Her attraction to Rousseau, balanced by her need to revise him, was also both typical of contemporary readers and prophetic of writers like Mary Wollstonecraft, whose oeuvre is haunted by her reactions, by turns admiring and disdainful, to the Swiss writer. Seward’s refinement of these predecessors was dynamic. While their principles chiefly guided her writing, her responses place her in dialogue not just with Pope and Rousseau but also with successors who ultimately parted more decisively with their early- and mid-eighteenth century models.
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