Anna Seward and the Poetics of Sensibility and Control Andrew O

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Criticism

Volume 58 | Issue 2 Article 9

2016 Anna Seward and the Poetics of Sensibility and Control Andrew O. Winckles Adrian College, [email protected]

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Recommended Citation Winckles, Andrew O. (2016) "Anna Seward and the Poetics of Sensibility and Control," Criticism: Vol. 58 : Iss. 2 , Article 9. Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol58/iss2/9 ANNA SEWARD At the 2011 meeting of the North American Society for the Study AND THE POETICS of Romanticism, Anne K. Mellor OF SENSIBILITY reflected on how the field has AND CONTROL changed since her foundational Andrew O. Winckles 1993 study Romanticism and Gender. She commented that, though women writers such as Anna Seward and the End of the Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Eighteenth Century by Claudia and Mary Shelley have cemented Thomas Kairoff. Baltimore, MD: themselves as legitimate objects Johns Hopkins University Press, of study, this has largely been at 2012. Pp. 328. $58 cloth. 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 centu- ries 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 where Seward lived throughout in her own time and, in a criti- her adult life. Mentored by fel- cal milieu strongly informed by low Lichfield resident Erasmus Romanticism, continues to be over- Darwin, Seward early developed looked today. Claudia Thompson a propensity for poetry, which she Kairoff’s Anna Seward and the End later displayed at the famous and of the Eighteenth Century aims to much-mocked Batheaston salon correct some of these misreadings of Anna Miller. Though she never by joining a growing number of married, Seward carried on a scan- scholarly publications dedicated to dalous, if chaste, relationship with restoring Seward to her place as the married Lichfield clergyman an important transitional figure in John Saville—a connection that eighteenth-century poetry.2 Key to was later broken off by her father. Kairoff’s study is evoking the histor- She also was passionately attached ical and cultural contexts whereby to her younger foster sister Honora contemporary readers would have Sneyd to whom she wrote many understood Seward’s poetry. In of her best sonnets, a fact that has doing so, Kairoff aims to “return generated much speculation by her poems to view and even to scholars like Paula Backscheider as admiration, not like the dusty con- to the nature of Seward’s sexuality. tents of a neglected Wunderkammer Nevertheless, the main source of [chamber of wonder] but as dis- her fame during her lifetime was tinguished examples of a rich a series of patriotic elegies celebrat- poetic tradition” (14). In large part, ing British heroes like Captain Kairoff succeeds by using a dizzy- Cook and her collection of Original ing array of primary sources, clear Sonnets on Various Subjects (1799), readings of Seward’s texts, and a which stood in stark contrast to critical grasp of Seward’s contexts. the contemporaneous sonnets Though we may question the use- of Charlotte Smith in that they fulness of the categories of “eigh- exalted the Miltonic sonnet over teenth century” and “Romantic” the Shakespearean. altogether in considering Seward’s Given the level of recognition work, Anna Seward and the End of and notoriety Seward enjoyed dur- the Eighteenth Century is neverthe- ing her lifetime, Kairoff’s impres- less a valuable contribution to our sive and wide-ranging book begins understanding of the period and with a consideration of Seward’s women’s contributions to poetry. critical neglect or what she calls her Anna Seward was the only “critical disappearance” (15). This surviving daughter of Lichfield disappearance is grounded in the canon Thomas Seward, who work of Seward’s first nineteenth- administered the Bishop’s Palace, century editor and biographer, ON Anna Seward 343 her friend, protégé, and literary control. Raised in the era where the executor Sir Walter Scott. Though cult of sensibility was ascendant as Scott respected Seward as a men- evidenced in contemporary novels, tor, he did not deem it a sound plays, and music, Seward imbibed decision financially or careerwise it along with her training in the to tie himself too closely to a poet poetic diction of Milton and Pope. whose style was quickly grow- To her, the ability to feel deeply and ing outdated. He thus quickly finely was instrumental in creating edited a three-volume collection great art. As a result, her work is of Seward’s works and appended replete with the language of sensi- a preface that exalted his mentor bility, a language that, though influ- as an exemplary woman of virtue ential to Romanticism, was rapidly but cast her as a mediocre poet. going out of style when most of her This estimation of her works has major works were published. colored most subsequent criticism Along with sensibility, con- and, as Kairoff argues, “Because trol operates as a restraining force Seward’s poetry does not quite fit throughout Seward’s work— the stylistic paradigms of Augustan poetic control of diction, emotional or Romantic verse, or even of the control of sensibility, and personal verse that has until recently been control of life and reputation. As called ‘pre-Romantic,’ she has sim- a woman writing in a field still ply been excluded from most criti- dominated by “great men” like cal discussions except as a name in Samuel Johnson, Seward had to lists of late-century women poets” carefully control her entry into the (16). It is this liminal quality, this public sphere and then, once there, ability to work in between estab- her subsequent literary reputation. lished categories, that distinguishes As Kairoff argues in chapters 11 Seward’s work but also consigned and 12 of the book, it was actually it to critical oblivion. Seward’s complicated relationships With this critical disappearance with her literary fathers Erasmus as her organizing framework, Darwin and Samuel Johnson that Kairoff proceeds to analyze almost precipitated her desire to control all of Seward’s major works, her own literary reputation in a cli- focusing on the historical and cul- mate that was rapidly shifting away tural contexts that would have from her poetic sensibilities. Thus, made them comprehensible to I would argue that Seward’s genius eighteenth-century audiences but lies in her ability to balance sensi- ended up offending Romantic sen- bility and control throughout her sibilities. Key to understanding her work—marking out a territory for work, according to Kairoff, are the herself as a woman poet that was recurring themes of sensibility and previously unexplored. 344 Andrew O. Winckles

Kairoff presents a telling example, constructed a version example of how Seward worked of Britishness in the face of an to control her literary reputa- American war that was not tion in chapter 2 by arguing that going well. As Linda Colley has Seward’s decision to debut her detailed in Britons: Forging the poetry at Lady Miller’s much- Nation (1992), the experience of maligned Batheaston salon did the American war deeply shook not indicate the inferiority or pro- the newly formed British nation, vinciality of her poetry but rather forcing it to work to form its iden- Seward’s desire to manage her tity in the wake of the loss of the entry into public space. By rely- American colonies.3 As Britain’s ing on the norms of sociability Muse, Seward sought to do this and manuscript circulation com- poetically—giving voice to a new mon to her class, Seward shrewdly national consciousness. ensured that there was a market Likewise, Seward’s 1792 poeti- for her poetry when she decided to cal novel Louisa, which is the enter into print. Chapters 3–5 are subject of chapters 6 and 7, is an thus devoted to examining how exercise in sensibility and control. Seward managed this transition— Encompassing four books, Louisa first by working to break down adapts both Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard the developing divisions between (1717) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s amateur and professional authors Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (Julie, and then by using British national or the new Heloise, 1761) in order events like the death of Captain to construct the story of a young Cook to construct an image for woman who is jilted by her lover herself as the British muse. As after her lover’s father convinces a middle-class woman, Seward him to marry a rich heiress to save did not think it proper to present the family fortune. Predictably, the herself as a professional poet in rich heiress eventually dies after liv- the sense that writers like Samuel ing a life of debauchery, and Louisa Richardson and Henry Fielding is reunited with her lover. Crucial were beginning to establish. to the plot of Louisa is its empha- Instead, she used her status as an sis on sensibility, a late example amateur who spoke for the nation that illustrates the degree to which to establish a position somewhere Seward was indebted to sensibility in between amateur and profes- in forming her poetics. Ultimately, sional, as a woman who did not as Kairoff outlines in chapter 7, need to work but who provided Louisa is an exercise in control. It inspiration and guidance to the is the father figure who convinces nation. Her Elegy on Captain Cook his son to marry for money instead and Monody on Major Andre, for of love, and it was Seward’s own ON Anna Seward 345 father who at first discouraged her Paula Backscheider—have read interest in writing, rejected two of these sonnets as evidence of trans- her early suitors, and broke off her gressive same-sex desire and have illicit relationship with John Saville. viewed the break between the two Thus, it is only by reconstructing women as caused by Honora’s mar- these incidents through poetry that riage to Edgeworth and move to Seward is able to regain control of Ireland.4 Kairoff offers an alterna- her own poetic destiny. tive interpretation, arguing con- These key themes are also vincingly that the relationship that instrumental to understanding existed between the two was more Seward’s Original Sonnets, which of a maternal one, with the older Kairoff explores at length in Seward seeking to control in some chapters 8–10. Championing the measure Honora’s life and choice Miltonic form as the only legitimate of husband. When Sneyd ulti- form of British sonnet, Seward mately chose someone of whom occasionally composed her sonnets Seward disapproved, this precipi- in part as a response to Charlotte tated the cooling of the friendship Smith’s wildly popular Elegaic and Seward’s subsequent sorrow at Sonnets (1783), which Seward con- Honora’s untimely death. Seward sidered trivial and inferior. This thus uses the sonnet form in an critical disdain for Smith’s work attempt to control her own con- was due in part to Seward’s role flicted emotions upon Honora’s in helping to establish a British betrayal and death—a type of con- canon of authors and particularly trol that she could not ultimately the canonization of Milton. To this exert over Honora herself. end, she occasionally wrote sonnets Anna Seward is a writer that imitated Milton’s style, while located at the crossroads of the nevertheless adding the culture of eighteenth century. Inheritor of sensibility within which she was the Miltonic tradition, she nev- raised. ertheless employs a type of sensi- Of particular interest to Kairoff, bility that anticipates the poetry and indeed to most modern com- of Wordsworth and John Keats. mentators, are Seward’s Honora Though scornful of Charlotte sonnets, which she scattered Smith’s sonnets, she composes son- throughout the collection. These nets to Honora Sneyd every bit as sonnets detail her deep connection poignant as Smith’s meditations to her foster sister, Honora Sneyd, on melancholy. She also success- Honora’s subsequent marriage to fully navigates the transition from Richard Edgeworth, her alienation oral and manuscript culture to from Seward, and her death. Most print culture by using her amateur commentators—most influentially status as a salon poet to carefully 346 Andrew O. Winckles craft a public image—an image helps us think through how she would use to joust with men critical attitudes toward poetry like James Boswell on the pages of are formed and perpetuated and the Gentleman’s Magazine. It is for how these attitudes may occlude these reasons—within the proper a clearer understanding of histori- context—that Anna Seward was cal context. In this, Kairoff’s study a vitally important eighteenth- is exemplary in that it provides century writer, but it is also for the context that enables a fuller these reasons that she suffered understanding of Seward’s life critical neglect both then and now. and work. Kairoff argues that a true understanding of Anna Seward’s Andrew O. Winckles is assistant professor and literary contexts is “pertinent chair of the Department of Core Curriculum at Adrian College in Adrian, Michigan. His to ongoing debates among cur- work on Methodist women’s writing has been rent scholars as they distinguish published or is forthcoming in Eighteenth- eighteenth-century cultural, Century Studies, Nineteenth-Century Studies, Women’s Writing, and numerous scholarly political, and literary beliefs from collections. He is currently editing (with their Romantic-era counterparts” Angela Rehbein) the collection Women’s (3) and that her writings “illumi- Literary Networks of the Romantic Period: nate the turn to Romanticism” “That Tribe of Authoresses” that is forthcoming from Liverpool University Press, and he is (1). Furthermore, by exemplify- at work on the monograph “Consider the Lord ing so many different facets of as Ever Present Reader: Eighteenth-Century eighteenth-century and Romantic Women’s Writing and the Evangelical Media poetry and culture, Seward pro- Revolution.” vides the grounds for assessing these categories and tracking the shifts in eighteenth-century cul- NOTES ture. I would argue that this is in 1. Anne Mellor and Devoney Looser, part correct; however, the fact that “Women” (seminar held at the 2011 Seward fails to fit comfortably North American Society for the Study of Romanticism [NASSR] Conference, into any of these critical catego- Park City, UT, 12 August 2011). ries may ultimately argue against 2. See Teresa Barnard’s recent critical the usefulness of the categories biography, Anna Seward: A Constructed themselves. Instead of clarify- Life (London: Ashgate, 2009). ing the distinctions between the 3. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Augustan and the Romantic, Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Seward’s poetry might illustrate Yale University Press, 1992). the continuum of poetic sensibil- 4. Paula R. Backscheider, Eighteenth- ity across the century. As a poet Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre. who operated at the intersec- Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins tion of so many trends, Seward University Press, 2005.