Anna Seward

Anna Seward (12 December 1742 – 25 March 1809) was a long eighteenth century English Romantic poet, often called the Swan of Lichfield.

Life

Family life

Seward was the eldest of two surviving daughters of Thomas Seward (1708–1790), prebendary of Lichfield and Salisbury, and author, and his wife Elizabeth. Elizabeth Seward 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 small mining village in the Peak District of Derbyshire where her father was the rector, she and her sister, Sarah some sixteen months younger than her, passed nearly all their life in the relatively small area of the Peak District of Derbyshire and Lichfield, a cathedral city in the adjacent county of Staffordshire to the west, an area now corresponding to the boundary of the East Midlands and West Midlands regions.

In 1749 her father was appointed to a position as Canon-Residentiary at Lichfield Cathedral and the family moved to that city, where her father educated her entirely at home. They lived in the Bishop's Palace in the 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 than Anna. Anna Seward describes how she and her sister first met Honora, on returning from a walk, in her poem The Anniversary (1769). Sarah (known as 'Sally') died suddenly at the age of nineteen of typhus (1764). Sarah was said to be of admirable character, but less talented than her sister. Anna consoled herself with her affection for Honora Sneyd, as she describes in Visions, written a few days after her sister's death. In the poem she expresses the hope that Honora ('this transplanted flower') will replace her sister (whom she refers to as 'Alinda') in her and her parents affections.