This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Bridget Hourican. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 29 April 1773, Ireland
Died: 30 October 1819
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: Jane Susannah Wilkinson, J S Anna Liddiard
Liddiard, Jane Susannah (J. S.) Anna (c.1780–p.1819?), poet, was born in Co. Meath, daughter of Sir Henry Wilkinson , of Corballis, Co. Meath. She dedicated her Poems (Dublin, 1810) to her husband, the Rev. William Liddiard (1773–1841), an anglican clergyman of Wiltshire, who was also a poet, artist, and former army officer. He was vicar of Culmullen, Co. Meath (1807–10); that parish was then united to Knockmark, where he was vicar 1810–31. In 1811 the couple moved to Bath, where they spent two years and Anna published The sgelaighe; or, A tale of old (1811), apparently taken from an old Irish manuscript. Kenilworth and Farley Castle (1813) describes her return from Bath to Ireland, presumably to Knockmark. It is addressed to the ‘ladies of Llangollen’, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, whom she had visited. Her tale in verse, Theodore and Laura, subtitled ‘Evening after the battle’ (1816), appeared together with her husband’s Mont St Jean; both describe the battle of Waterloo. Her section shows a wife seeking her husband among the corpses and exhorts readers to grieve not for the dead but for the bereaved. The anonymous Mount Leinster (1819) is generally ascribed to her but may be the work of her husband. Her death date is not recorded, but it was evidently some time before her husband, who died in 1841 after taking a second wife in 1822, with whom he had a daughter. He and Anna Liddiard married 12 February 1798 and had a son, Henry Liddiard (b. 1800), who inherited the rectory of Knockmark (1831–53).
Liddiard’s verse is romantic and patriotic. Her poem ‘Addressed to Albion’ blames the ‘queen of wealth and fame’ for insult to her sister-kingdom, and ‘Conrade’, addressed to the fictitious brother of the abbot of east Meath whose abbey was ransacked by Cromwell, is full of righteous indignation at English atrocities. She and her husband preached religious tolerance; Mount Leinster blames the 1798 insurrection on the penal laws. She was sensitive to criticism and castigated reviewers in her preface to Kenilworth. When the Monthly Review called her too fond of personification, she diagnosed anti-Irish prejudice, though her bad reviews can more simply be blamed on her indifferent and derivative verse than on her patriotism.