This magnificent tomb is one of the first monuments you notice on walking into Lichfield Cathedral. It celebrates the father of the poet Anna Seward, and was erected in the last eighteenth century.
Anna, known as the Swan of Lichfield for her poetry, had nursed her ailing father for ten years before he died, and then commissioned this memorial; so the female figure in the sculpture represents daughterly grief, and maybe even can be said to symbolic of Anna herself.
Curiously, Anna has now been picked up by literary historians as a possible ‘Sapphic’ writer. She never married, and many of her poems express a longing for her close friend, and adopted sister, Honora, who died young.
She also made friends with the “Ladies of Llangollen Vale” two reclusive women writers of the time, who were known to wear semi-masculine attire. In
Stapleton Martin's monograph, she expresses support for women's rights, and a disdain for the type of marriage she saw around her.
I guess it’s possible – why not? – though no one has yet suggested she was a practising lesbian.
One other thing about the tomb is that it shows a bare-breasted maiden (representing Grief, or Daughterly Duty).
We nowadays find it odd to see bare-breasts on such a solemn piece, and in church too – but it’s possible that the bare chest is trying to show us that the figure of Grief is so distraught that she has let her clothes fall into disarray.
Related link:
Seward Tomb (in Public Sculpture of Staffordshire And the Black Country)
