ABSTRACT
As writer and critic, Robert Southey was intimately concerned with notions of authenticity and acts of authentication. Robert Southey has traditionally not been known for his sympathetic attitude to women writers. One of the anecdotes most frequently recounted of, and against, him is his advice to Charlotte Bronte that 'Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life: & it ought not to be'. Although born in 1742 and 1774 respectively, Anna Seward and Southey had much in common. Ambitious and successful authors, they were both the products of flourishing provincial societies. Southey writes to Seward as an equal, a fellow poet whose opinion he both respects and courts. His letters are marked by 'plain speaking & serious feeling' and contain confidential information about his response to contemporaries, including Coleridge and Wordsworth. Southey's Welsh-American poem played a central role in his relationship with Seward. It both generated their epistolary relationship and was the subject of Southey's earliest letters to her.
