ABSTRACT
Anna Seward tells stories and anecdotes about her friends’ lives and the places they inhabited, painting elaborate little word pictures of who they were, what they looked like, how they lived. The image Seward created for herself in her letters is of the independent, self-sufficient writer, an intellectual who constantly searches and challenges, exploring numerous and varied aspects of culture and society. As many other contemporary women writers found, there were hazards and pitfalls paving the route to the literary immortality which Seward strived towards. The independence Seward had battled for in her youth was of paramount importance to her and was not to be modestly concealed. There are other unpublished letters and manuscripts scattered across the world that open up the life that Seward had attempted to construct and that her editors and executors destroyed. From beneath layers of written, re-written, self-edited, edited, truthful or fictitious but certainly never straightforward writings, a different picture of Seward gradually emerges.
