This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Rolf Loeber, Magda Loeber and Angela Byrne. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 7 February 1774, Ireland
Died: 2 December 1870
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: Anna Maria Chetwode
Chetwood, Anna Maria (1774–1870), writer, was born on 7 February 1774, a daughter of the Rev. John Chetwood of Glanmire, Co. Cork (1742–1814), and Elizabeth Chetwood (née Hamilton) (d. 1826?), and great-granddaughter of Knightley Chetwood of Woodbrook, Portarlington, a friend of Jonathan Swift. Her father, who wrote but never published many small pieces of prose and verse – including the epitaph intended for, but never placed on, the tomb of Sarah Curran – was rector at Rathcooney, near Glanmire, Co. Cork (1770–1814). A nineteenth-century antiquary described him as ‘of a highly literary turn of mind’ and he was acquainted with Thomas Southwell, Bishop Berkeley, and Edmond Malone. Her elder sister, Elizabeth Hester (b. 1771) was also a prolific, if unpublished, poet.
The details of Chetwood’s early life are unclear. She was one of at least six children. John (1779–1805) was a captain in the British army and married Eliza Patton in 1803; in 1798, Elizabeth Hester married Robert Wilmot (1772–1815), deputy recorder of Cork and brother of Martha and Katherine Wilmot; Hester Jane married Reverend John Leveson Hamilton in 1815; Mary married William Thompson, Archdeacon of Cork; and Henrietta Margaret (d. 1864) married Horatio Townsend (1783–1864) of Woodside, Co. Cork, sometime after 1816. Chetwood herself never married. It appears that in the early 1800s, her brother John and some other family members relocated to Clifton, near Bristol, where John was buried on his untimely death in 1805, leaving a widow and infant daughter. Her whereabouts and activities in the 1810s and 1820s are unclear, but there is evidence to suggest that she may still have been living in Glanmire in 1821. It is also possible that she may have lived at Woodbrook, near Portarlington for a time in the 1820s, with her elderly and childless uncle, Jonathan Chetwood (1757–1839), high-sheriff of Queen’s Co., and his wife Margaret, daughter of Lawrence Clutterbuck of Derryluskon, Co. Tipperary. From 1833 until her death, Chetwood lived in Cheltenham, possibly with her unmarried sister-in-law, Alicia Wilmot (c.1776–1860). Anna Chetwood died on 2 December 1870 in Cheltenham.
Chetwood was, for long, assumed to have accompanied Martha and Katherine Wilmot and Eleanor Cavanagh (Katherine’s maid) to Russia to reside with Princess Ekaterina Romanovna Dashkova in 1803–8. The Cork antiquary John Windele first introduced this error in his Historical and descriptive notices of the city of Cork (1839). It is absolutely certain that Chetwood never travelled to Russia and that Windele appears to have mistakenly conflated the life stories of Chetwood and the Wilmot sisters. Indeed, many of the Wilmots’ letters from Russia are addressed to Chetwood.
Chetwood seems to have been educated by her parents, and seems to have had a lifelong interest in literature. She may have anonymously published two novels: Blue-stocking Hall (1827; 2nd edition 1829) and Tales of my time (1829). These were for many decades wrongly attributed to the English writer and Unitarian minister William Pitt Scargill, even though reviews and advertisements clearly indicated that it was public knowledge at the time of publication that the author of both novels was a woman. In 1839 John Windele publicly identified Chetwood as the author of both titles, but his account of her life contains several significant errors, and his authority is therefore questionable. The archives of the publisher, Henry Colburn indicate that the novels were penned by a ‘Mrs Wilmot’, but in the absence of a significant portion of the Wilmot-Chetwode family archive, sold privately in 1965 with only part of the collection going to the National Library of Ireland, the authorship question cannot be settled.
Blue-stocking Hall is an epistolary novel, mostly set in Co. Kerry and partly in England and the Continent, devoted to comparing a simple lifestyle in which nature, reason, honesty, and religion prevail, with an artificial lifestyle in which fashion, greed, and dishonesty reign. The novel strongly advocates women’s education. Tales of my time contains two novels, the second of which, ‘The young reformers’, is set in Ireland, the Continent, and Canada. The main character, the son of a Church of Ireland minister, lives quietly with his sweet and accomplished wife in relative obscurity. Through their neighbours, who live at ‘Painesville’, and are steeped in republican ideas, having read Paine, Godwin, Volney, Wollstonecraft, etc., the main character is introduced to the United Irishmen. This involvement causes him to flee to Canada. Windele claimed that Chetwood also authored a work called Snugborough, which may or may not be a misspelling of Truckleborough hall, which also has been attributed to Scargill. Snugborough has never been discovered. Truckleborough hall bears little resemblance to Blue-stocking Hall and Tales of my time, as it is set in England, does not refer to Ireland, and reflects on French politics and the revolution, mentioning Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine.
Chetwood was considered by those close to her to possess a talent for poetry, particularly epitaphs. At least 15 of her manuscript poems, some of which are written under her initials, are found among the Wilmot papers in the RIA, in Senate House Library, University of London and in the Benjamin Guinness collection at Farmleigh House (RIA MS 12.L.25; Senate House Library MS 704; Farmleigh 8741, 871). These include poems to the memory of Robert Emmet; her friend, Anne Christian, Baroness Hompesch (1775–1803); and her ‘beloved brother’ John.
Chetwood was part of a circle of literary, travelling, and radical Anglo-Irish women that included Maria Edgeworth; Martha and Katherine Wilmot; Anne Latham, Lady Listowel; Anne and Bess Penrose of Woodhill; Sarah Curran; and Emily, Lady Cloncurry. This circle was extended further through the Wilmots’ connections to Margaret King and Princess Dashkova. While her published work has been all but forgotten for many decades, in her time she exemplified the personal pleasure and intellectual stimulation provided by writing for public and private audiences. Her poetry reflects the strength and longevity of her female friendships, and the deep meaning with which compositions for private circulation were suffused.