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.
Nearly a decade before Elizabeth Barrett Browning
's The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point, but following William Wordsworth
's Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman and Felicia Hemans
's The Indian Woman's Lament...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The poem is innovative in its blend of novelistic discourse and subject-matter—its depiction of the urban landscape and contemporary social issues including wife-beating and prostitution were indebted to both the English and French novel—with the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Grace Aguilar
The central character is the undowered girl Florence Leslie—so called because of her birth in Italy—whose high-minded principles have been fuelled by indiscriminate
Aguilar, Grace. Woman’s Friendship. D. Appleton and Company.
13
reading in history, poetry, and romance at an early age...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sappho
Elizabeth Moody
engagingly converts Sappho
into a contemporary in Sappho Burns her Books and Cultivates the Culinary Arts, 1798.
Jay, Peter, and Caroline Lewis. Sappho Through English Poetry. Anvil Press Poetry.
98
But many women poets accepted the notion of her rejected love for Phaon: Robinson
Intertextuality and Influence
Susan Ferrier
SF
's subject-matter remains constant: this is her third anatomy of the moral realities beneath the surface of polite society. Here, more than in her earlier novels, she makes use of quotation from poets like...
Intertextuality and Influence
Isabella Beeton
The overall design of the book stressed organisation and efficiency, listed recipes in alphabetical order grouped by method, and placed its index at the front rather than the back of the book. IB
made no...
Intertextuality and Influence
L. M. Montgomery
Her writing, like Emily's, was profoundly influenced by nineteenth-century English writers and poets. LMM
named Hemans
and Byron
in personal letters; Emily cites Tennyson
and Wordsworth
.
Gillen, Mollie. The Wheel of Things. Fitzhenry and Whiteside.
149, 161
Intertextuality and Influence
Georgiana Fullerton
The novel's title foregrounds GF
's perhaps fantastic extrapolation from history, justified in the Introduction with the assertion that Truth and fiction are closely blended in this tale. . . . Those who are sometimes...
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
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
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
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...