[8] Seward, as a long-term friend of the Levett family of Lichfield, noted in her Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin (Erasmus) that three of the town's foremost citizens were thrown from their carriages and injured their knees in the same year.

The family home in the Bishop's Palace became the centre of a literary circle that included Erasmus Darwin, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, where Anna was encouraged to join in, as she later relates.

[16] Among the subjects he taught were theology and numeracy, how to read and appreciate poetry, and how to write and recite it, although these deviated from the conventional drawing-room accomplishments of the time.

[18] Among many literary figures Anna Seward conversed with was Sir Walter Scott, who later published her poetry posthumously.

Also in her circle were the writers Thomas Day, Francis Noel Clarke Mundy, Sir Brooke Boothby, Willie Newton (the Peak Minstrel)[19] and Mary Martha Sherwood.

She was outspoken about the institution of marriage,[15][6] not unlike her heroine in Louisa,[23] a position later echoed in the novels of her step-niece, Maria Edgeworth.

[24] In 1985 Lillian Faderman suggested that her orientation was lesbian,[25] but there is little known evidence of the erotic or sexual in her ties and the term relates more to 20th than to 18th-century concepts of identity.

[24] Seward began to write poetry early with encouragement from her father, a published poet, but against the wishes of her mother.

[14][15] Later she was encouraged by Dr Erasmus Darwin, who set up a medical practice in Lichfield in 1756,[27] although their relations with him included frequent conflicts.

Horace Walpole said she had "no imagination, no novelty",[28] but she was praised by Mary Scott,[29] who had written admiringly of her father's attitude to female education.

[30] Several poems, particularly Lichfield ones, concern her friend and adopted sister Honora Sneyd, in a tradition described as "female friendship poetry".

Her work could also be arch and teasing, as in her poem Portrait of Miss Levett, on a Lichfield beauty later married to Rev.

Six vast volumes of her letters appeared posthumously in 1811,[34] revealing broad knowledge of English literature and casting light on Midland literary culture in her day.

[37] She was encouraged by Darwin to reject a conservative backlash to the revelations of Carl Linnaeus's sexual system of plant classification.

It can only be unfit for the perusal of such females as still believe the legend of their nursery that children are dug out of a parsley-bed; who have never been at church, or looked into a Bible, – and are totally ignorant that in the present state of the world, two sexes are necessary to the production of animals.

"[39][notes 6]This caution prevailed through most of the 19th century, typically from writers such as Richard Polwhele, in his poem The Unsex'd Females (1798), although she escaped his personal criticism, being considered to have a proper attitude.

[45] Later feminist scholars in particular have seen Seward as a valuable observer of gendered relations in late 18th-century society, playing a transitional role in its principles and emerging romanticism.