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.
EH
anonymously contributed Mabel (a ghost story about a deaf girl) to an anthology, The Remembrance, edited by Thomas Roscoe
and dedicated to Queen Adelaide
.
This volume also contained work by Felicia Hemans
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/.
Blain, Virginia. “Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Eliza Mary Hamilton, and the Genealogy of the Victorian Poetess”. Victorian Poetry, Vol.
33
, No. 1, pp. 31-51.
44
Literary responses
Isabella Neil Harwood
Reviewers of the volume hailed INH
as a poet and an artist and recognized the same characteristics that had earned her other publications so much praise: purity, high thinking, and freedom from extravagance.
“Mr. Ross Neil’s New Poems”. Pall Mall Gazette, No. 4580.
She was...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ann Hawkshaw
Published by Jackson and Walford
in London and by Simms and Dinham
in Manchester, the book opens with several invocational stanzas that name both Felicia Hemans
and William Wordsworth
as inspirational figures for the...
Literary responses
Ann Hawkshaw
In a review for the Athenæum, George Walter Thornbury
stated abruptly that AH
's collection has at least two merits,—it has no Preface and it has a purpose. Finding that the sonnets do not...
Textual Features
Barbara Hofland
The story concerns an actual Spanish boy in Texas, and contrasts good and bad Indians. The Choctaws befriend Manuel, but the Camanches, whose very nature seems imbued with cruelty,
Feminist Companion Archive.
carry him into captivity...
Publishing
Margaret Holford
In October 1830 Margaret Hodson, formerly Holford, was solicited by Baillie for contributions to the ongoing series of prose-and-verse miscellanies edited by M. Corbett
and her five sisters. (The first volume, The Odd Volume...
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...
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...
Textual Features
Mary Howitt
Set around Penmaenmawr in Wales, where the Howitts were in the habit of visiting, it carries a religious message, and seeks to demonstrate the active intervention of God to punish crime. Its heroine is...
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
Family and Intimate relationships
Mary Anne Jevons
Mary Anne was very close to her father, William Roscoe
, the historian, writer, patron of the arts, abolitionist and reformer. William began his professional career as a barrister, but retired early. Soon afterwards he...
Intertextuality and Influence
Maria Jane Jewsbury
MJJ
started writing The Three Histories in 1828 while on holiday in Wales, and completed it when she returned to Manchester.
Clarke, Norma. Ambitious Heights. Routledge.
12
Scholar Norma Clarke
argues that the book's interests in the incompatibility...
Textual Features
Maria Jane Jewsbury
The second story, The History of a Nonchalant is an early fictional treatment of religious doubt as suffered by its intellectual male protagonist, Charles. He travels to Rome, where he marries an Italian poet...
Textual Features
Maria Jane Jewsbury
Jewsbury's anonymity enables her to leave her personal friendship with Hemans out of the picture. She distinguishes between male poetic power and female poetic beauty in a manner that goes back to Burke
's Origin...
