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.
It was probably Mary A. Marzials
' anthology Gems of English Poetry which made poetry the only lesson the Knoxes disliked. Winifred felt that Hemans
's boy on the burning deck cut a poor figure...
Literary responses
Laetitia Pilkington
Wordsworth
chose from her works eleven melancholy and religious couplets from Sorrow, for inclusion in his manuscript anthology presented to Lady Mary Lowther
at Christmas 1819. He omitted the later part of the poem...
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...
Education
Jean Rhys
At a very young age, JR
imagined that God was a book. She was so slow to read that her parents were concerned, but then suddenly found herself able to read even the longer words...
Literary responses
Laura Riding
Critic Jerome McGann
asserts that LR
, while making no claim to transcendent poetic power, makes poetry out of her own power to rise above her subject. In this he associates her with Felicia Hemans
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.
ER
's reputation stood high at her death, though it was subject to the ambivalence commonly met with by women writers at this period. The anonymous memoirist on her began by contradicting the barbarous opinion...
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.
4: ix-x
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...
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
Literary responses
Lydia Howard Sigourney
Edgar Allan Poe
's review of the US version in Graham's Magazine withdrew the charge of imitating Hemans
that he had formerly levelled at LHS
. She had now, he felt, found her own voice.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
183
Publishing
Lydia Howard Sigourney
As her own need to make money from her writing grew, LHS
turned increasingly to biography as a popular, saleable, and respected form. In 1829, she published anonymously through the American Sunday-School Union
at Philadelphia...
Literary responses
Lydia Howard Sigourney
Literary historian Emily Stipes Watts
and others have noted Sigourney's high reputation in her own day (the female Milton, the American Hemans, the sweet singer of Hartford, generally ranked higher than William Cullen Bryant
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
Germaine de Staël
After completing this novel GS
wrote, I'd like a really big [writing] table, it seems to me I've got the right to it now.
Kobak, Annette. “Mme de Staël and Fanny Burney”. The Burney Journal, Vol.
4
, pp. 12-35.
19
Corinne was enormously influential for nineteenth-century women writers. The model...
