Felicia Hemans

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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.

Connections

Connections Sort descending Author name Excerpt
Reception Constance Naden
He offered a list of the best eight women poets, where CN was included together with Elizabeth Barrett Browning (at the head) and Christina Rossetti (who was annoyed that he omitted Augusta Webster ). He...
Reception L. E. L.
Several memoirs of LEL circulated after her death, contributing further to the cult of the poetess that had arisen after the death of her alter-ego Felicia Hemans .
Reception L. E. L.
Although LEL died on the cusp of the Victorian period, she was widely read in its early years, and was invoked explicitly by many other writers who followed her, including women poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Reception Mary Boyle
The poem MB contributed, My Father's at the Helm, attracted a considerable amount of attention, and achieved some popularity.
Boyle, Mary. Mary Boyle. Her Book. Editor Boyle, Sir Courtenay Edmund, E. P. Dutton; John Murray.
xvi
It presents an allegory of life in which the father is God, and the...
Reception Marion Reid
Scholar Margaret McFadden notes that this work was tremendously successful, particularly in the United States, where it went through five editions between 1847 and 1852. The 1847 edition and all ensuing versions were printed...
Reception Ella Wheeler Wilcox
During a visit to England EWW was honoured by her London publishers, Gay and Hancock , with a luncheon of sixty men—publishers, editors, bookmen of all kinds, newspaper men, and some invited guests from other...
Reception Mary Russell Mitford
She contacted several people (including the novelist Lady Dacre and the Whig hostess and diarist Lady Holland ) for support in her application, which was fuelled by the examples of the pensions granted to Sydney Morgan
Residence Mary Ann Browne
The coincidence of her birth surname with that of Felicia Hemans , combined with her time in Liverpool, made many people suppose that the two were sisters: an idea encouraged by a complimentary sonnet, The...
Textual Features Germaine Greer
The selection of poets is highly informed. It reaches back in time before GG 's anthology Kissing the Rod, to Anne Askew and Isabella Whitney , and forward to Carol Ann Duffy and Margaret Atwood
Textual Features Sarah Josepha Hale
In her preface SJH quotes a Blackwood's article on Hemans which says the many contemporary women with cultivated minds have made it highly feminine to be intelligent. Hale herself somewhat puzzlingly adds that the Bible...
Textual Features Dinah Mulock Craik
Despite her regular invocation of conventional gender roles, DMC , like Felicia Hemans before her, considers alternative views of heroic male effort in poems such as her later The Arctic Exploration: from the Woman's Side...
Textual Features Annie Tinsley
The epigraph to the volume is from Moore 's Loves of the Angels. AT was assumed to be influenced by Felicia Hemans , but denied that this was the case. The ruin and misery...
Textual Features Dorothy Wellesley
DW 's selection, though, demonstrates a serious interest in women's literary and feminist history. Of the selections whose authors can be identified, almost half are women. Though Marguerite, Lady Blessington , doyenne of the albums...
Textual Features Edna St Vincent Millay
The themes here, says Milford, are those of a New England Victorian girlhood, with plenty of lost love, inclement weather, and loneliness, yet without willed renunciation, domesticity, or piety. Millay's language is usually simple and...
Textual Features Anne Thackeray Ritchie
The Blackstick Papers treat a wide range of topics; three of the thirteen concern women writers, and the book's frontispiece is from a miniature of Felicia Hemans . ATR notes the stoicism
Ritchie, Anne Thackeray. Blackstick Papers. Books for Libraries Press.
146
of Mary Berry

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