Author: Seward, Anna
Biography:
SEWARD, Anna (1742-1809: ODNB)
Although she was born in Eyam, Derbyshire, where her father was rector at the time, she lived all her life from the age of seven in Lichfield, where her parents were socially prominent. Her mother Elizabeth Hunter was the daughter of the headmaster of Lichfield School (where Samuel Johnson, q.v., was a pupil), and her father Thomas Seward became Canon residentiary at Lichfield Cathedral. When Anna was twelve the family moved into the Bishop's Palace, where her mother died in 1780. She was permitted to stay there by herself after the death of her father in 1790. Thomas Seward had literary interests and had published poetry. He fostered his daughter's talents; at home he created a literary circle that included Erasmus Darwin (q.v.). Seward had suitors and formed a few close friendships with both men and women, but at last chose the single life. After the death of her mother she ran the household, cared for her father and contended with her own ill health, maintained a vast correspondence, and wrote in a range of genres from poetry through sermons to anonymous reviewing. Her work had admirers but came increasingly to be seen as out of date. After Johnson's death, she felt free to attack his aggressive personality and became embroiled in controversy with Boswell. She wrote, on the other hand, sympathetic Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin (1804). She had encouraged the literary aspirations of the young Walter Scott (q.v.) and named him as her literary executor before she died, of "scorbutic fever," in 1809. Scott edited her poetry (3 vols. 1810) but refused to do the same for her correspondence, which appeared in an expurgated form, from Constable, in 1811. Her Journal and Sermons were published in 2017. (ODNB 9 Sept. 2020; Orlando)
Other Names:
- Miss Seward