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.
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