Anna Seward: A Constructed Life

A Critical Biography

Teresa Barnard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317180661
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In her critical biography of Anna Seward (1742-1809), Teresa Barnard examines the poet's unpublished letters and manuscripts, providing a fresh perspective on Seward's life and historical milieu that restores and problematizes Seward's carefully constructed narrative of her life. Of the poet Anna Seward, it may be said with some veracity that hers was an epistolary life. What is known of Seward comes from six volumes of her letters and from juvenile letters that prefaced her books of poetry, all published posthumously. That Seward intended her correspondence to serve as her autobiography is clear, but she could not have anticipated that the letters she intended for publication would be drastically edited and censored by her literary editor, Walter Scott, and by her publisher, Archibald Constable. Stripped of their vitality and much of their significance, the published letters omit telling tales of the intricacies of the marriage market and Seward's own battles against gender inequality in the educational and workplace spheres. Seward's correspondents included Erasmus Darwin, William Hayley, Helen Maria Williams, and Robert Southey, and her letters are packed with stories and anecdotes about her friends' lives and characters, what they looked like, and how they lived. Particularly compelling is Barnard's discussion of Seward's astonishing last will and testament, a twenty-page document that summarizes her life, achievements, and self-definition as a writing woman. Barnard's biography not only challenges what is known about Seward, but provides new information about the lives and times of eighteenth-century writers.

Chapter 1‘My dear Emma’: The Juvenile Letters, 1762–1768

DOI: 10.4324/9781315567228-2

In October 1762, Anna Seward wrote the first of a series of thirty-nine personal letters to an imaginary friend, ‘Emma’. This is the journal of her formative years from the age of nineteen to twenty-five, and in the first of the letters she gives her reasons for wanting to express her thoughts in this way:

And now, dear Emma, are you not ready to ask your friend wherefore she moralizes thus sententiously, at an age when it is more natural, perhaps more pleasing, to feel lively impressions, than to analyze them? There is a wherefore. I have been called romantic. It is my wish that you should better know the heart in which you possess so lively an interest.¹

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1 Seward, Poetical Works, vol. I, p. xlvi.

The journal reinforces Seward's literary self-definition by demonstrating her extensive knowledge of literature and contemporary culture. To emphasise empathetic aspects of her personality, she also sets herself up as a moral advisor and counsellor; her compassion for her friends’ problems allows her to express intimate reflections on her own life. Over a period of time Seward edited and revised her epistolary journal, anticipating its publication with her poems towards the end of her long and successful literary career. As she worked at her revisions, she added a mature perspective to a collection of youthful anecdotes by fleshing out her thoughts with sophisticated literary critiques and philosophical musings.

When the two letter collections were eventually published after Seward's death, with the juvenile letters as the preface to her poetry edition and the later correspondence as a six-volume set, they had been reduced to a great degree by her editors, executors and family. In the same way, the image of Anna Seward that remains within the correspondence has also been diminished to a one-dimensional, book-obsessed figure. Without the comedy, sorrows and warmth of her anecdotes, the published correspondence still confirms her sharp intellect but certainly lacks her sense of humour, sensitivity and vivacity. Her elevated prose does nothing to help the negative image. She acknowledged that her style was unfashionable but that it suited her, telling the landscape gardener Humphry Repton that both her poetry and prose were ‘not much calculated to please the popular taste’.² Although drastically edited by Walter Scott, the juvenile letters still contain a credible account of six years of Seward's life. In terms of literary control, it was she, not a biographer, who originally assembled the correspondence, although Scott's editing affected the published composition. Rather than edit out individual names or details in cases of criticism or gossip, he removed whole sections and sometimes complete letters without explanation or annotation. Seward's own editing technique can be seen in a few of her early manuscripts which are not part of the main body of juvenilia, but are clearly first drafts. These take the form of short letters which she later extended into publishable versions.

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2 Seward, ‘Letter to H. Repton, Esq.’ (23 February 1786), Letters, vol. I, p. 126.

Seward gives her correspondent, Emma, a level of authenticity, depicting her with her a shy disposition and a brief life history. Emma's deceased mother, she explains in the first letter, had been a close friend of her own mother, Elizabeth, and this was the basis of their friendship, ‘They said, when they last met, a little before the death of your excellent parent, “our children will love each other”,’³ she writes. Irrespective of the life history, there is an ambiguity surrounding this absent friend. There are no shared childhood memories. There is a third close friend who appears in the juvenile letters, known only as ‘Nanette B—’, who also purportedly wrote to Emma before dying suddenly in March 1765. Seward employs the device of temporarily removing Nanette from the scene with a series of ‘pressing engagements’ which, she confirms, have prevented her from writing to Emma. In this way Seward not only controls the narrative but presents a rounded chronicle for the reader by relating Nanette's story directly to Emma. As a literary construct, Emma is most probably a composite of Seward's friends and her favourite fictional characters, blended to form the ideal intimate confidante as a counterpoise to her own self-constructed image. Later, after Seward had become an established writer, rather than negotiate a literary cul-de-sac when she no longer needed the single confidante, she ‘killed off’ Emma, who receives just one mention in the adult letters as a friend who died.

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3 Seward, Poetical Works, vol. I, p. xlvii.

If Seward situated herself as both the author and the central heroine of her own anecdotal drama, she offered a forceful denial that any influence came from conventional cliché-ridden fiction. In the first of the letters, she distances herself from her young contemporaries whose feelings and actions, particularly relating to friendship and love, could easily be manipulated by ‘inferior’ reading material.⁴ Although female literacy rates were exceptionally high by the mid-century, interaction with print culture was restricted for many young women. Books were expensive and often difficult to acquire, with a novel costing at least 7s. 6d., and works of history, over a guinea. Circulating libraries were comparatively cheap and were accessible for young women, should they wish to use them. For an annual fee of between ten shillings and one guinea, books on all subjects, from mathematics to botany to philosophy, could be borrowed by anyone who was able to subscribe. Borrowers could easily choose their own self-educational route. The libraries provided sentimental novels specifically for women, and this had the progressively beneficial effect of widening the rate of reading, expanding the output of reading material and thus pushing women to write specifically for female readers.

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4 Seward, Poetical Works, vol. I, p. xlvi.

Seward showed no interest in the majority of fashionable romantic novels, which, in general, emphasised traditionally female qualities such as intuition and excluded the perceived masculine quality of reason. Counteracting this trend, her juvenile letters have themes which emphasise the masculine virtues, and there is more reason than intuition in her literary instruction and moral counselling on love affairs. Aside from a few novels from a mere handful of writers whom she considered superior and which were usually recommended to her or sent by friends, she disapproved of the romance form. ‘You must not suppose that I make a practice of reading novels’, she informed the Derbyshire poet William Newton when writing to him in praise of Thomas Holcroft's ‘exquisite’ translation of the French novel Caroline of Lichfield.⁵ Her attitude conformed to the widespread prejudice against novel-reading which Jane Austen satirised in Northanger Abbey:

– there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit and taste to recommend them. ‘I am no novel reader – I seldom look into novels – Do not imagine that I often read novels […] It is really very well for a novel.’ – Such is the common cant. – ‘And what are you reading, Miss —?’ ‘Oh! It is only a novel!’ replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame.⁶

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5 Seward, ‘Letter to Mr W. Newton, The Peak Minstrel’ (10 May 1787), Letters, vol. I, p. 293; Thomas Holcroft, Caroline of Lichfield: A Novel, translated from the French [of Madam de Montolieu], 3 vols (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1786).

6 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey; Lady Susan; The Watsons; Sanditon, ed. by James Kinsley and John Davie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 23.

There is no evidence that Seward read the abundant conduct material, moral guides or women's journals, such as Charlotte Lennox's Ladies Museum (1760– 61), a typical example of one of the more informative miscellany magazines that helped shape the lives of young women. Preferring literary journals, she sent her later essays, letters, poems, critical reviews, strictures and articles directly to the Gentleman's Magazine or the Critical Review. As a young woman, she took absolutely no interest in fashion or beauty, and she gently mocked those who did, also making it clear that she had no desire to read about domestic concerns or wifely duties. Her moral models were fictional characters from poems and classic literature, or she followed the example set by strong female friends, such as Anne Mompesson, who was one of her closest advisors and mentors. Seward was sixteen and on a two-month summer visit to her birthplace, Eyam, with her father when she first met Mompesson, who was twenty years her senior and was to become an extraordinary role model for Seward throughout her life. Seward describes her friend as a cheerful, energetic, eccentric, wilful woman of ‘repulsive exterior’. Mompesson lived on a legacy of £200 a year, farming and cultivating the family estate in rural Mansfield Woodhouse. She had turned down several offers of marriage in order to live an independent life, taking the opportunity to travel to France and Germany with her nephew, who was the Court's envoy to Bonn, and to live in Sw...