ABSTRACT
Anna Seward's juvenile letters have themes which emphasise the masculine virtues, and there is more reason than intuition in her literary instruction and moral counselling on love affairs. Seward gives her correspondent, Emma, a level of authenticity, depicting her with her a shy disposition and a brief life history. In her juvenile letters Seward sought to express a spiritual notion of friendship, believing that it should have stronger bonds than marital love. To establish the intimacy of her relationship with Emma, the first letter opens with a lengthy monologue on ideal friendship, which allows Seward to express her private thoughts and feelings on the subject. The fiction writers to whom Seward best related in her youth wrote in the epistolary novel genre which dominated the eighteenth-century European literary canon. Seward’s journalised epistolary form was the ideal vehicle for her self-narrative, and she embedded meticulous autobiographical detail into the letters.
