Seward in queer studies

Seward wrote profusely about her foster sister Honora Sneyd. The particulars of the two women’s relationship remain a subject of scholarly speculation. From a critical standpoint, Seward’s arguably obsessive fixation with Sneyd as a literary subject might be read in two different ways. Norma Clarke argued that Sneyd was a source of inspiration for Seward, a literary trope she used to emulate the classics. Another view, defended by queer studies specialists such as Lillian Faderman, Fiona Brideoake, and Susan Lanser and supported by scholars such as Stuart Curran and Paula Backscheider, is that Seward’s passionate poems about her sister are examples of homoromantic poetry. Nevertheless, the sonnets to Sneyd are not her only poems ascribed to queer themes. In 1796 Seward published “Llangollen Vale, Inscribed to the Right Honourable Lady Eleanor Butler, and Miss Ponsonby,” a long poem inspired by, and dedicated to, the Ladies of Llangollen, the celebrated couple who devoted their lives to each other and with whom Seward became very close in the summer of 1795. She commemorated their life together in this poem, a celebration of Ponsonby and Butler’s cottage and of their exclusive circle.

Reception and legacy

Seward’s contemporaries paid her homage in the form of poems and letters to The Gentleman’s Magazine and other periodicals. These were written by readers and by celebrated writers and friends such as William Hayley, Mary Scott, and Helen Maria Williams, especially as a response to her Monody and Elegy. Richard Polwhele also praised her genius in his well-known poem “The Unsex’d Female.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge included Seward’s work in his Sonnets from Various Authors (1796). Southey declared that she “was not so much over-rated at one time, as she has since been unduly depreciated.” Lord Byron read her letters and owned a copy of her Memoirs of Dr. Darwin, and William Wordsworth stated that “her verses please me, with all their faults, better than those of Mrs. Barbauld.” Walter Scott, who was also a correspondent of Seward’s, was entrusted sole copyright of her works upon her death. Seward meticulously selected, transcribed, and edited her own letters and negotiated their publication with Archibald Constable. Constable, advised against the purchase by the publisher John Murray, who questioned their commercial value, was given sole copyright for them in her will. He published half of them under the title Letters of Anna Seward: Written Between the Years 1784 and 1807 in 1811, two years after Seward’s death. The letters suffered from Constable’s heavy editing; fragments were rewritten and anecdotes censored. Consequently, the careful self-portrayal Seward had intended as her legacy was destroyed, and later scholars, particularly during the 20th century, treated her accomplishments dismissively. Her reputation began to recover only at the turn of the 21st century.