Anna Seward

Anna Seward (12 December 1742 – 25 March 1809) was an English Romantic poet, often called the Swan of Lichfield. She benefited from her father's progressive views on female education.

Seward was the elder of two surviving daughters of Thomas Seward (1708–1790), a prebendary of Lichfield and Salisbury and an author, and his wife Elizabeth. Elizabeth later had three further children (John, Jane and Elizabeth), who all died in infancy, and two stillbirths. Anna Seward mourned their loss in her poem Eyam (1788). Born in 1742 at Eyam, a mining village in the Peak District of Derbyshire, where her father was Rector, she and her sister Sarah, some 16 months younger, passed nearly all their life in that small area of the Peak District of Derbyshire, and at Lichfield, a cathedral city in adjacent Staffordshire.

In 1749, Anna's father was appointed a Canon-Residentiary at Lichfield Cathedral. The family moved there, where her father educated her at home. In 1754 they moved into the Bishop's Palace in Cathedral Close. When a family friend, Mrs Edward Sneyd, died in 1756, the Sewards took in one of her daughters, Honora Sneyd, who became an adopted foster sister to Anna. Honora was nine years younger. Anna Seward described in a poem, The Anniversary (1769), how she and her sister first met Honora on returning from a walk. Sarah (known as Sally) died suddenly of typhus at the age of 19 in 1764. She was said to have an admirable character, though less talented than her sister. Anna consoled herself with affection for Honora Sneyd, as she describes in Visions, written a few days after her sister's death. There she expresses a hope that Honora ("this transplanted flower") would replace her sister (referred to as Alinda) in her and her parents' affections.

Anna Seward cared for her father in the last ten years of his life, after he had suffered a stroke. When he died in 1790, he left her financially independent with an income of £400 per annum. She continued to dwell at the Bishop's Palace until she died in 1809.

Seward, as a long-term friend of the Levett family of Lichfield, noted in her Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin (Erasmus) that three of the town's foremost citizens were thrown from their carriages and injured their knees in the same year. "No such misfortune," Seward wrote, "was previously remembered in that city, nor has it recurred through all the years which since elapsed."

Anna showed a bent for learning from early childhood. Canon Seward, author of The Female Right to Literature (1748), held progressive views on female education. Encouraged by her father, Anna was said to be able to recite works of Milton by the age of three.

Her gift for writing was clear at the age of seven, when the family moved to Lichfield. The family home in the Bishop's Palace became the centre of a literary circle that included Erasmus Darwin, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, where Anna was encouraged to join in, as she later relates. Canon Seward's (if not his wife's) attitudes to educating girls was progressive for the time, but not excessively so. He was a poet himself, yet tried to curb Anna's passion for poetry, although she chose the composition of it for her own studies. Among the subjects he taught were theology and numeracy, how to read and appreciate poetry, and how to write and recite it, although these deviated from the conventional drawing-room accomplishments of the time. The omissions were also notable, including languages and science, although the girls could pursue them alone if they felt inclined. Nor was Anna unskilled in domestic matters.

Among many literary figures Anna Seward conversed with was Sir Walter Scott, who later published her poetry posthumously. Also in her circle were the writers Thomas Day, Francis Noel Clarke Mundy, Sir Brooke Boothby, Willie Newton (the Peak Minstrel) and Mary Martha Sherwood. She came to be seen as heading a coterie of regional poets, influenced by writers such as Thomas Whalley, William Hayley, Robert Southey, Helen Maria Williams, Hannah More and the Ladies of Llangollen. She was also involved in the Lunar Society in Birmingham, which would sometimes meet at their home. Both Darwin and Day belonged. Seward corresponded with other members such as Josiah Wedgwood and Richard Lovell Edgeworth.