Gendering telemachus: Anna Seward and the epic rewriting of Fénelon’s Télémaque

This chapter examines Anna Seward’s epic rewriting of Telemaque, looking at the innovations that Seward introduces to Fenelon’s text, the ideological shift that these divergences represent, and the gender implications of this shift. “Telemachus” is significant not because it is exceptional to Seward’s body of work, but because it is so representative of it, even though it is her only recorded attempt at producing an epic. A comparison of Seward’s depiction of Calypso’s island with those of Fenelon and Burrell shows the extent of Seward’s injection of the poetics of sensibility into the original text. Seward celebrates the lush space of Calypso’s island so despised in Fenelon’s and Burrell’s texts, since it offers a source for sensual, and thus sentimental, stimulus. Seward’s insistent feminization of Telemachus so that he is situated squarely in the midst of this sentimental female space rather than being obviously alien to it.