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Female
'authorism', according to Anna Seward, requires an 'obtrusive courage'.
The pathway to authorship for eighteenth-century women was spread with
many obstacles and Seward had to negotiate the gendered codes of conduct
on her way to becoming one of the most influential and commercially successful
authors of the period. Her obtrusive courage proved to be all important
in overcoming the restrictions facing her.
My essay sets out the difficulties that writing women had to confront
and examines the individual way that Seward challenged these. Although
the literacy rate was rising and women's public role was beginning to
be reconfigured with increasing latitude in many areas, involvement in
print culture was limited. Most women were seriously hindered by the lack
of education, yet Seward insisted that this held no major disadvantage
to her writing career or to her self-worth. She embarked on a rigorous
programme of self-education. At the age of sixteen she first experienced
the constraints imposed on literary women, when writing poetry was forbidden
by her parents. Her position as an author appeared untenable yet she turned
her back on the marriage market, still claiming an entitlement to write
and resolving the conflict between domestic duty and authorship with a
necessarily compromising balance. When she finally achieved authorship
status, the politics of the publishing industry had to be confronted.
My essay seeks to address the ways in which Anna Seward's fight for the
justification of her own literary worth brought about the inception of
her controversial biography of Erasmus Darwin and in resisting conventional
pressures and challenging the hypocrisy of the print industry, she was
able to contribute to a female literary tradition.
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ISSN 1744-9618
