Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century

Anna Seward and her career defy easy placement into the traditional periods of British literature. Raised to emulate the great poets John Milton and Alexander Pope, maturing in the Age of Sensibility, and publishing during the early Romantic era, Seward exemplifies the eighteenth-century transition from classical to Romantic. Claudia Thomas Kairoff’s excellent critical study offers fresh readings of Anna Seward’s most important writings and firmly establishes the poet as a pivotal figure among late-century British writers. Reading Seward’s writing alongside recent scholarship on gendered conceptions of the poetic career, patriotism, provincial culture, sensibility, and the sonnet revival, Kairoff carefully reconsiders Seward’s poetry and critical prose. Written as it was in the last decades of the eighteenth century, Seward’s work does not comfortably fit into the dominant models of Enlightenment-era verse or the tropes that characterize Romantic poetry. Rather than seeing this as an obstacle for understanding Seward’s writing within a particular literary style, Kairoff argues that this allows readers to see in Seward’s works the eighteenth-century roots of Romantic-era poetry. Arguably the most prominent woman poet of her lifetime, Seward’s writings disappeared from popular and scholarly view shortly after her death. After nearly two hundred years of critical neglect, Seward is attracting renewed attention, and with this book Kairoff makes a strong and convincing case for including Anna Seward’s remarkable literary achievements among the most important of the late eighteenth century. — Paula R. Feldman, editor of British Women Poets of the Romantic Era

Author	Claudia T. Kairoff
Format	Ebook
ISBN	9781421403281
Language	English
Pages	352
Publication Date	11-21-2011
Publisher	JHU Press

1 review for Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century

Rated 5 out of 5

ReadingRoom (verified owner) – 04/30/2025

This scholarly work not only looks at the life of Anna Seward, but her most important writings as well. She really led a very interesting and non-conventional life. Anna Seward was a poet and a prolific correspondent of the late eighteenth century. Her mother died while Anna was still at home–an event that left Anna without a mother but with the freedom not to marry. As the eldest daughter, it was her responsibility to care for her father, and so she stayed at her family home and tended to him through a long illness. When he died, she was in her forties, and no longer under any social obligation to marry. As she was quite outspoken in her opinions of marriage (openly criticizing popular guidebooks for women that purported any marriage as preferable to none) the inability to marry young does not seem to have been a problem for her. Anna was well-educated, known for her lively, generous nature and her unconventional ideas. She was educated at home, and read French, Italian, and Latin. Lichfield was one of the major provincial literary centers of the 18th century, and hers was a literary household. She began writing poetry young, publishing in periodicals and circulating her poems among friends. Her style of verse was more conventional than her ideas, tending toward the enthusiastic and sentimental. She wrote many poems commemorating events and celebrating special places, and she is best known for these, as well as for her elegies. This book is a well thought out and well researched work and rightfully puts Ms. Seward back on her throne as queen of eighteenth century poets.

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