Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century

325 Pages·2011·4.634 MB·English

by  Claudia T. Kairoff

Anna Seward and the End
of the Eighteenth Century
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Anna Seward and the End
of the Eighteenth Century
•
claudia thomas kairoff
The Johns Hopkins University Press
Baltimore
© 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2012
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kairoff, Claudia Thomas.
Anna Seward and the end of the eighteenth century /
Claudia Thomas Kairoff.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-0328-1 (acid-free paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4214-0328-5 (acid-free paper)
1. Seward, Anna, 1742–1809—Criticism and interpretation.
2. England—Intellectual life—18th century. I. Title.
PR3671.S7Z74 2012
821′.6—dc22 2011019914
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
“Anna Seward and the Sonnet: Milton’s Champion” was originally
published in Aphra Behn Online 1 (2011) and is reprinted here
with permission of the editors.
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For Peter D. Kairoff
Elizabeth T. and David J. Butler
Robyn L. and John J. Thomas III
and
Holly D. Thomas
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Contents
Preface ix
Introduction 1
1 Under Suspicious Circumstances: The (Critical)
Disappearance of Anna Seward 15
2 “Fancy’s Shrine”: Lady Miller’s Batheaston Poetical Assemblies 32
3 The Profession of Poetry 51
4 British Patriot 70
5 Wartime Correspondent: The French Wars
and Late-Century Patriotism 98
6 Seward and Sensibility: Louisa, a Poetical Novel, in Four Epistles 117
7 Louisa and the Late Eighteenth-Century Family Romance 138
8 Milton’s Champion 158
9 Corresponding Poems 179
10 The “Lost” Honora 199
11 Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin: Digging in The Botanical Garden 227
12 Anna Seward, Samuel Johnson, and the End
of the Eighteenth Century 240
Notes 267
Bibliography 283
Index 295
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Preface
When I began working on this study in 2004, I thought I had chosen—to borrow
the phrase from Jane Austen—“a heroine whom no one but myself will much
like” (Letters 209). Anna Seward (1742–1809) had been the subject of curiously
pejorative biographies, had been overlooked by most scholars of the later eighteenth
century, and was being dropped from both eighteenth-century and Romantic-era
literary anthologies. While thanks to editors like Paula R. Feldman and writers
like Stuart Curran, she is now included in studies of early Romantic-era women
writers, she fi ts among them rather uneasily.1 Her sonnets, collected and pub-
lished in 1799, marked her participation in a revival of that verse form that was
among the harbingers of what we now call the Romantic era. But most of Seward’s
writings adhere to traditions established much earlier and practiced by writers like
John Milton and Alexander Pope. Even Seward’s sonnets, owing to her champion-
ship of Miltonic style and subjects, differ widely from sequences such as Charlotte
Smith’s, which focus nearly exclusively on mysterious, irreparable grief. Seward,
trained as a child to recite Milton and as a young poet to emulate Pope, was es-
sentially an eighteenth-century poet, albeit a very late inheritor in that line of
succession. Welcome recognition of her status is her recent inclusion in British
Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century, the important anthology edited by
Paula Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia.
To state that a poet born in 1742, whose last important work was published in
1804, was an eighteenth-century writer will seem laughably obvious to readers
outside the academy. But any literary specialist will recognize that because 1780,
the year of Seward’s fi rst publication, marks the inauguration of the Romantic era,
she is likely to be grouped with writers such as Smith, Helen Maria Williams, and
Mary Wollstonecraft, whose early productions are now considered integral to the
development of Romanticism. That Seward was primarily a writer of the late-
eighteenth century in fact increases her importance to students of the ensuing pe-
riod. Seward participated eloquently in the literary, cultural, and political debates