Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Felicia Hemans
-
Standard Name: Hemans, Felicia
Birth Name: Felicia Dorothea Browne
Married Name: Felicia Dorothea Hemans
Pseudonym: F. H.
Pseudonym: A Lady
A major Romantic poet and the most popular woman poet (or poetess as she and others expressed it) in English during the nineteenth century, FH
published nineteen volumes of verse and two dramas. While most of her work was poetry—songs, lyric poetry, dramatic lyrics (arguably dramatic monologues), narrative poetry, and verse drama—she also published literary criticism, and some of her private letters survive. After her death she became in the mid-Victorian period a household name and a staple for memorizing as the popular educational practice at home and in the colonies. Her evocation of the domestic affections and the values associated with English national valour and imperial strength resonated strongly with her contemporaries, but in the late Victorian period her work fell out of favour. Recently interest has revived in her as a female voice within Romanticism, and as a vehicle for bourgeois, domestic, and British hegemony that nevertheless also critiques the very values and ideals for which her work became a byword. Recognition of her as a major poetic voice has accompanied a substantial shift in the understanding of British Romanticism.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
She...
Friends, Associates
Geraldine Jewsbury
GJ
encountered a strong female literary role model early in life, when at sixteen she summered in Wales with her siblings, staying in a cottage not far from that of Felicia Hemans
and her family...
Friends, Associates
Eliza Mary Hamilton
She was introduced to William Wordsworth
through her brother
, and Wordsworth visited the Hamilton siblings at Dunsink in August 1829.
Blain, Virginia. “Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Eliza Mary Hamilton, and the Genealogy of the Victorian Poetess”. Victorian Poetry, Vol.
33
, No. 1, pp. 31-51.
38
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Although they had been corresponding by letter for some time, this holiday was the first time the two writers met in person. MJJ
was soon accepted into Hemans
' social circle and become friends with...
Friends, Associates
Mary Russell Mitford
She knew most of the literary women of her day, including Felicia Hemans
(who wrote to ask her for an autograph),
L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, editor. The Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford as Recorded in Letters from Her Literary Correspondents. Hurst and Blackett.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
2: 213
Friends, Associates
Grace Aguilar
Around this time her acquaintance deepened with Camilla Crosland
.
Crosland, Camilla. Landmarks of a Literary Life, 1820-1892. Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Galchinsky, Michael. The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer. Wayne State University Press.
145
Friends, Associates
Mary Howitt
In Nottingham MH
met L. E. L.
and perhaps Elizabeth Fry
. She was visited by Mary
and Dora Wordsworth
(wife and daughter of the poet), and later she and her husband stayed with the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Catherine Hume
The starting-point for the poem is the tradition (subtly questioned) of Sappho's suicide as an abandoned woman; this fact links the text to other responses to the topic by other women poets including Felicia Hemans
Intertextuality and Influence
Harriet Smythies
In a critical preface HS
reveals her gender though not her name. She opens by invoking the author of Rienzi (either, Mary Russell Mitford
or Edward Bulwer Lytton
). The two groups of lovers and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Bishop
One poem here embodies a particularly complex statement of relationship to the earlier tradition of women's writing: Casabianca, whose starting point is the poem of the same title by Felicia Hemans
. Hemans's poem...
Intertextuality and Influence
L. E. L.
LEL's own sense of herself as part of a female poetic tradition is revealed in her tributes to other poets, including Felicia Hemans
and Mary Ann Browne
.
L. E. L.,. Poetical Works of Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Editor Sypher, Francis Jacques, Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints.
408, 544, 340
Intertextuality and Influence
Lady Charlotte Bury
The title-page quotes some lines from Robert Burton
's Anatomy of Melancholy which begin, When I go musing all alone.
Bury, Lady Charlotte. "Alla Giornata"; or, To the Day. Saunders and Otley.
title-page
This is a novel of cosmpolitan culture, set in fifteenth-century Italy. The quotation...
Intertextuality and Influence
Germaine de Staël
After completing this novel GS
wrote, I'd like a really big [writing] table, it seems to me I've got the right to it now.
Kobak, Annette. “Mme de Staël and Fanny Burney”. The Burney Journal, Vol.
4
, pp. 12-35.
19
Corinne was enormously influential for nineteenth-century women writers. The model...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ada Cambridge
The Author's Introduction is followed by one hundred short poems divided into two sections, which variously treat the central themes of mortality, impermanence, or the saving grace of Christianity. The poems are predominantly but not...
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Texts
Hemans, Felicia. The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy. W. Baxter, 1816.
Hemans, Felicia. The Sceptic. John Murray, 1820.
Hemans, Felicia. The Siege of Valencia. John Murray, 1823.
Hemans, Felicia. The Siege of Valencia. Editors Wolfson, Susan J. and Elizabeth Fay, Broadview, 2002.
Hemans, Felicia. The Vespers of Palermo. John Murray, 1823.
Hemans, Felicia, and Harriet Browne Owen Hughes. The Works of Mrs. Hemans. W. Blackwood, 1839.