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.
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 Leaves from the Unpublished Journals, Letters, and Poems of Charlotte Elliott.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
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...
Textual Features
Christina Rossetti
The first poem, in the vein of major precursors Felicia Hemans
and L. E. L.
, represents the head of the lyric tradition as irrepressibly sighing and yearning for death, albeit that death will be...
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
Mary Russell Mitford
MRM
here mixed personal gossip, local scene-painting, criticism, and extracts.
Mitford, Mary Russell. Recollections of a Literary Life; or, Books, Places and People. R. Bentley.
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...
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...
Textual Features
Mary Russell Mitford
MRM
's letters regularly indulge in analysis of books. She comments on works by both men and women, in English and French, and her opinions shift a good deal with age. She reacted with horror...
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...
Textual Production
Anne Marsh
The title-page bore a creative misquotation from William Wordsworth
: She lived within her father's halls . . . And very few to love—which converts the rustic Lucy into an upper-class heroine like AM
Textual Production
Elizabeth Ham
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
Textual Production
Mary Tighe
Henry Moore copied poems into a manuscript album which he titled Poems HM 1811 (now at Chawton House Library
). The first 66 pages are occupied by MT
's work, at the end of which...
Textual Production
Grace Aguilar
In a letter of 30 November 1843—also to Mrs Samuel Cohen—GA
noted having read the life of Mrs Hemans
, written by her sister, in the poet's posthumous Works; she hoped to be...
Textual Production
A. Mary F. Robinson
In the same year, 1894, AMFR
contributed critical introductions to selections by Felicia Hemans
and Joanna Baillie
in The English Poets, edited by Humphry Ward
(husband of the well-known novelist
).
Robinson, A. Mary F. et al. “Critical Introductions”. The English Poets, edited by Thomas Humphry Ward, New Edition, Macmillian, pp. 4: 221 -34.
