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.
The Athenæum printed MJJ
's detailed essay on the poetic development of her friend Felicia Hemans
.
Wilkes, Joanne. “’Only the broken music’? The Critical Writings of Maria Jane Jewsbury”. Women’s Writing, Vol.
7
, No. 1, pp. 105-18.
114
Fryckstedt, Monica Correa. “The Hidden Rill: The Life and Career of Maria Jane Jewsbury, II”. Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, Vol.
67
, No. 1, The Library, pp. 450-73.
465
Author summary
Maria Abdy
MA
, whose work spans the Romantic and Victorian periods, was a poet who wrote wittily on religious and secular topics, and was an early champion of the governess. With Felicia Hemans
, she was...
Performance of text
Clara Balfour
CB
also spoke frequently on literature, focussing on women writers. In her lecture entitled The Female Poets of England, delivered at the opening of the eighteenth session of the Cheltenham Literary and Philosophical Institution
Occupation
Maria Jane Jewsbury
MJJ
managed her father's household and cared for her five younger siblings for thirteen years. Her household responsibilities prevented her from reading or writing during the day, so she was forced to pursue her literary...
Material Conditions of Writing
Maria Jane Jewsbury
MJJ
wrote Lays of Leisure Hours in 1828 while holidaying with her siblings in Wales, where her friendship with Hemans
deepened.
Clarke, Norma. Ambitious Heights. Routledge.
12
Literary responses
Frances Browne
In the Dictionary of Literary BiographyMarya DeVoto
noted the interest in The Star of Attéghéi (and other poems in the volume) in the idea of exile, and the elegaic tone that pervades the volume...
Literary responses
Joanna Baillie
The Chief Justice of Ceylon, Sir Alexander Johnstone
, asked that two of JB
's last plays be translated into Singalese.One—The Bride, A Tragedy (published in summer 1828), had a Singalese subject.
Quarterly Review. J. Murray.
38 (1828): 602
Literary responses
Mary Howitt
Felicia Hemans
(whose work is warmly praised in it, in a piece called The Record of Poetry)
Woodring, Carl Ray. Victorian Samplers: William and Mary Howitt. University of Kansas Press.
22
admired the volume's feeling and beauty enough to write to MH
and tell her so, thereby...
Literary responses
Lydia Howard Sigourney
Edgar Allan Poe
's review of the US version in Graham's Magazine withdrew the charge of imitating Hemans
that he had formerly levelled at LHS
. She had now, he felt, found her own voice.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
183
Literary responses
Maria Jane Jewsbury
Following her untimely death, writers such as Felicia Hemans
and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
expressed regret that the extraordinary powers of MJJ
's mind (particularly remarkable, said Barrett Browning, in a woman) had failed to produce...
Literary responses
Mary Ann Browne
The Monthly Review, though anxious that publicity might not be good for the young poet or her talent, nevertheless estimated her talent highly, found in the title poem the genuine divine fire, and...
Literary responses
Lydia Howard Sigourney
Literary historian Emily Stipes Watts
and others have noted Sigourney's high reputation in her own day (the female Milton, the American Hemans, the sweet singer of Hartford, generally ranked higher than William Cullen Bryant
Literary responses
Mary Ann Browne
A posthumous review in the Dublin University Magazine of Sketches from the Antique noted the gravity and rich melody of these poems (their descriptions, it said, apparently with approval, had no dash or storm)...
Literary responses
Laetitia Pilkington
Wordsworth
chose from her works eleven melancholy and religious couplets from Sorrow, for inclusion in his manuscript anthology presented to Lady Mary Lowther
at Christmas 1819. He omitted the later part of the poem...
Literary responses
Mary Tighe
As soon as it was brought to public attention (as the work of a woman who had died tragically young), Psyche attracted a rush of attention. The Quarterly Review accorded Tighe high praise as being...
