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 school moved to Avonbank House in Stratford upon Avon, a Tudor mansion that had once belonged to a cousin of Shakespeare's, in May 1824. Here Elizabeth learned English, history, geography and music. Women...
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
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...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Fenton
Fenton sets out to paint a a familiar picture of the everyday occurrences, manners, and habits of life of persons undistinguished either by wealth or fame
Fenton, Elizabeth. The Journal of Mrs. Fenton. Editor Lawrence, Sir Henry, Edward Arnold.
1-2
in British India. But this is largely unfulfilled...
Two years later, William Ellis
began another religious publication, The Christian Keepsake and Missionary Annual, whose title was an answer to another popular gift-book, The Keepsake.
Chase, Karen, and Michael Levenson. The Spectacle of Intimacy: A Public Life for the Victorian Family. Princeton University Press.
An errata to this volume notes that the poem The Two Voices was written by Felicia Hemans
, and wrongly attributed to CE
.
Elliott, Charlotte. Leaves from the Unpublished Journals, Letters, and Poems of Charlotte Elliott. Religious Tract Society.
front matter
Intertextuality and Influence
Eliza Dunlop
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...
Literary responses
Harriet Downing
According to the Metropolitan Magazine's obituary on HD
, this volume won golden opinions from all sorts of people as well as bringing in a healthy profit. The Quarterly reviewed it together with work...
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...
Literary responses
Eliza Cook
An 1848 preface to a US edition of her poems ranked EC
's popularity almost as high as that of Felicia Hemans
or Caroline Norton
. It characterises her work in terms of emotion and...
Family and Intimate relationships
Frances Power Cobbe
Lloyd was the daughter of the squire of Rhagatt in Merionethshire, Wales; a maiden aunt in the family had been a friend of the Ladies of Llangollen (Eleanor Butler
and Sarah Ponsonby
)...
Fictionalization
Lady Anne Clifford
The Memorial Pillar, a poem by Felicia Hemans
, meditates on the monument which LAC
set up to record her final parting from her mother.
Wilson, Frances. “The Italy of Human Beings”. London Review of Books, pp. 26-7.
27
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...
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...