Anna Seward And The Poetics Of Sensibility And Control

At the 2011 meeting of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, Anne K. Mellor reflected on how the field has changed since her foundational 1993 study Romanticism and Gender. She commented that, though women writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley have cemented themselves as legitimate objects of study, this has largely been at the expense of a broader understanding of how women writers were working during the period. In addition to the Big Six male Romantics, we have in many cases simply added the Big Three female Romantics.¹ Though this has begun to change in the last ten years, with important studies appearing about women like Anna Letitia Barbauld, Mary Robinson, Joanna Baillie, and Hannah More, we still know shockingly little about women writers' lives, cultural contexts, and works.

A case in point is Anna Seward, a poet and critic well known and respected in her own lifetime, but whose critical neglect in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has largely shaped how recent critics interact with her work. An eighteenth-century poet trained to imitate Alexander Pope and John Milton, Seward published during the period that William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Percy Bysshe Shelley were beginning their revolution in poetic diction. Seward's work was misunderstood in her own time and, in a critical milieu strongly informed by Romanticism, continues to be overlooked today. Claudia Thompson Kairoff's Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century aims to correct some of these misreadings by joining a growing number of scholarly publications dedicated to restoring Seward to her place as an important transitional figure in eighteenth-century poetry.² Key to Kairoff's study is evoking the historical and cultural contexts whereby contemporary readers would have understood Seward's poetry. In doing so, Kairoff aims to "return her poems to view and even to admiration, not like the dusty contents of a neglected Wunderkammer [chamber of wonder] but as distinguished examples of a rich poetic tradition" (14). In large part, Kairoff succeeds by using a dizzying array of primary sources, clear readings of Seward's texts, and a critical grasp of Seward's contexts. Though we may question the usefulness of the categories of "eighteenth century" and "Romantic" altogether in considering Seward's work, Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century is nevertheless a valuable contribution to our understanding of the period and women's contributions to poetry.

Anna Seward was the only surviving daughter of Lichfield canon Thomas Seward, who administered the Bishop's Palace, where Seward lived throughout her adult life. Mentored by fellow Lichfield resident Erasmus Darwin, Seward early developed a propensity for poetry, which she later displayed at the famous and much-mocked Batheaston salon of Anna Miller. Though she never married, Seward carried on a scandalous, if chaste, relationship with the married Lichfield clergyman John Saville—a connection that was later broken off by her father. She also was passionately attached to her younger foster sister Honora Sneyd to whom she wrote many of her best sonnets, a fact that has generated much speculation by scholars like Paula Backscheider as to the nature of Seward's sexuality. Nevertheless, the main source of her fame during her lifetime was a series of patriotic elegies celebrating British heroes like Captain Cook and her collection of Original Sonnets on Various Subjects (1799), which stood in stark contrast to the contemporaneous sonnets of Charlotte Smith in that they exalted the Miltonic sonnet over the Shakespearean.

Given the level of recognition and notoriety Seward enjoyed during her lifetime, Kairoff's impressive and wide-ranging book begins with a consideration of Seward's critical neglect or what she calls her "critical disappearance" (15). This disappearance is grounded in the work of Seward's first nineteenth-century editor and biographer, her friend, protégé, and literary executor Sir Walter Scott. Though Scott respected Seward as a mentor, he did...