Teresa Barnard – författare

Highlighting the remarkable women who found ways around the constraints placed on their intellectual growth, this collection of essays shows how their persistence opened up attributes of potent female imagination, radical endeavour, literary vigour, and self-education that compares well with male intellectual achievement in the long eighteenth century. Disseminating their knowledge through literary and documentary prose with unapologetic self-confidence, women such as Anna Barbauld, Anna Seward, Elizabeth Inchbald and Joanna Baillie usurped subjects perceived as masculine to contribute to scientific, political, philosophical and theological debate and progress. This multifaceted exploration goes beyond traditional readings of women’s creativity to add fresh, at times controversial, insights into the female view of the intellectual world. Bringing together leading experts on British women’s lives, work and writings, the volume seeks to rediscover women’s appropriations of masculine disciplines and to examine their interventions into the intellectual world. Through their engagement with a unique perspective on women’s lives and achievements, the essays make important contributions to the existing body of knowledge in this important area that will inform future scholarship.

In her critical biography of Anna Seward (1742-1809), Teresa Barnard examines the poet's unpublished letters and manuscripts, providing a fresh perspective on Seward's life and historical milieu that restores and problematizes Seward's carefully constructed narrative of her life. Of the poet Anna Seward, it may be said with some veracity that hers was an epistolary life. What is known of Seward comes from six volumes of her letters and from juvenile letters that prefaced her books of poetry, all published posthumously. That Seward intended her correspondence to serve as her autobiography is clear, but she could not have anticipated that the letters she intended for publication would be drastically edited and censored by her literary editor, Walter Scott, and by her publisher, Archibald Constable. Stripped of their vitality and much of their significance, the published letters omit telling tales of the intricacies of the marriage market and Seward's own battles against gender inequality in the educational and workplace spheres. Seward's correspondents included Erasmus Darwin, William Hayley, Helen Maria Williams, and Robert Southey, and her letters are packed with stories and anecdotes about her friends' lives and characters, what they looked like, and how they lived. Particularly compelling is Barnard's discussion of Seward's astonishing last will and testament, a twenty-page document that summarizes her life, achievements, and self-definition as a writing woman. Barnard's biography not only challenges what is known about Seward, but provides new information about the lives and times of eighteenth-century writers.

Anna Seward, eighteenth-century poet, biographer, and letter-writer, wrote her juvenile journal in the form of a series of letters to an imaginary friend, "Emma". Seward intended the letters as an autobiographical account of the period of her youth before she achieved fame as a published poet. Towards the end of her life, she collated her works for posthumous publication, bequeathing the manuscripts to Walter Scott. However, as Scott disliked much of the anecdotal substance of the juvenile letters, he censored them, removing over half of the contents before publication. This volume restores the journal to its original format, making the case for Seward's importance as a social and cultural commentator. The letters discuss topical events and private concerns, illuminating not only Seward's life, but also giving fascinating insights into the manners and mores of mid-eighteenth-century provincial life in England. Also included in this volume is a portfolio of four Anglican sermons written by Seward and delivered by unsuspecting clergymen. These were also excised by Scott who agreed with Seward's family that they were too controversial to publish as their author was a woman. The sermons provide retrospective evidence of Seward's efforts to contribute to feminist Enlightenment debate. Introducing them into the public domain now gives us an understanding of women's unacknowledged achievements and also of their silencing.