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.
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
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...
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...
Textual Features
Charlotte Elliott
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 Leaves from the Unpublished Journals, Letters, and Poems of Charlotte Elliott.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
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Sarah Stickney Ellis
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.
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...
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
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...
Education
Elizabeth Gaskell
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...
Friends, Associates
Anne Grant
Among AG
's acquaintances in her later years were Felicia Hemans
and Thomas Campbell
.
Paston, George, and George Paston. “Mrs. Grant of Laggan”. Little Memoirs of the Eighteenth Century, E. P. Dutton, pp. 237-96.
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...