It is ironical that AS
, who during her lifetime progressed from suffering the opprobrium reserved for the old maid to suffering sly criticism (behind her back) for the allegedly improper nature of her relationship...
Family and Intimate relationships
Maria Edgeworth
In 1773 Maria was motherless for less than four months before she acquired the first of three successive stepmothers: Honora Sneyd
, with whom Richard Lovell Edgeworth
had recently fallen in love.
Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Clarendon, 1972.
41-2, 46
Honora...
Family and Intimate relationships
Anna Seward
She was nearly fourteen when the five-year-old Honora Sneyd
, whose mother was dead, came to live in the Seward household.
Ashmun, Margaret. The Singing Swan. Yale University Press; H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1931.
9-10
This early friendship was crucial to her. When Honora married Maria Edgeworth
's...
Friends, Associates
Anna Seward
Though she lived remote from literary circles, AS
moved from her childhood in an intellectually lively milieu, at that time provided by her parents' exercise of hospitality.
Ashmun, Margaret. The Singing Swan. Yale University Press; H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1931.
7-8
Some of her lifelong friends lived in...
Textual Production
Maria Edgeworth
During the same year, ME
's father
and first stepmother
planned a series of dialogues for children. Their dialogues were to be called Harry and Lucy. Thomas Day
was to contribute to the project...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Anna Seward
The sonnets are written in strict Milton
ic form. One of their favourite themes is love of nature and the countryside; one or two deal with Seward's love for Honora Sneyd
. In rendering Horace...
Timeline
1782: George Romney painted a picture to illustrate...
Women writers item
1782
George Romney
painted a picture to illustrate (after the fact) William Hayley
'a Triumphs of Temper, 1781: Serena, reading Burney
's Evelina. The model was Honora Sneyd
.
Brewer, John. The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997.
607, 609
1783-89: Thomas Day anonymously published The History...
Writing climate item
1783-89
Thomas Day
anonymously published The History of Sandford and Merton, a didactic book for children in three volumes (the second published in 1786).
Butler, Marilyn. “Edgeworth’s Stern Father: Escaping Thomas Day, 1795-1801”. Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-Century Canon, edited by Alvaro Ribeiro and James G. Basker, Clarendon, 1996, pp. 75-93.
82-3
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
68 (1789): 327
Cox, Michael, editor. The Oxford Chronology of English Literature. Oxford University Press, 2002, 2 vols.