Felicia Hemans

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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.

Connections

Connections Author name Sort descending Excerpt
Publishing Maria Jane Jewsbury
The Athenæum printed MJJ 's detailed essay on the poetic development of her friend Felicia Hemans .
Wilkes, Joanne. “’Only the broken music’? The Critical Writings of Maria Jane Jewsbury”. Women’s Writing, Vol.
7
, No. 1, pp. 105-18.
114
Fryckstedt, Monica Correa. “The Hidden Rill: The Life and Career of Maria Jane Jewsbury, II”. Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, Vol.
67
, No. 1, The Library, pp. 450-73.
465
Occupation Maria Jane Jewsbury
MJJ managed her father's household and cared for her five younger siblings for thirteen years. Her household responsibilities prevented her from reading or writing during the day, so she was forced to pursue her literary...
Friends, Associates Maria Jane Jewsbury
Determined to be a writer, MJJ actively sought literary society. Her other literary friends included author and editor Samuel Laman Blanchard , dramatist James Robinson Planché , the Rev. George Robert Gleig , and Sir Walter Scott
Friends, Associates Maria Jane Jewsbury
Although they had been corresponding by letter for some time, this holiday was the first time the two writers met in person. MJJ was soon accepted into Hemans ' social circle and become friends with...
Family and Intimate relationships Maria Jane Jewsbury
Her sister Geraldine was her bridesmaid and Felicia Hemans ' brother-in-law, the Rev. H. Hughes , performed the ceremony, during which MJJ is reported to have uttered the terrible obey, with edifying distinctness.
Gillett, Eric, and Maria Jane Jewsbury. “Maria Jane Jewsbury: A Memoir”. Maria Jane Jewsbury: Occasional Papers, Oxford University Press, p. xiii - lxvii.
lix
Espinasse, Francis, and Francis Espinasse. “Maria Jane Jewsbury”. Lancashire Worthies: Second Series, Simpkin, Marshall; John Heywood, pp. 323-39.
330
Howe, Susanne. Geraldine Jewsbury: Her Life and Errors. George Allen and Unwin.
18
death Maria Jane Jewsbury
The news of MJJ 's death took some time to reach England; Felicia Hemans did not hear of it until the following summer. Shocked by the news, Hemans wrote that MJJ was taken away in...
Material Conditions of Writing Maria Jane Jewsbury
MJJ wrote Lays of Leisure Hours in 1828 while holidaying with her siblings in Wales, where her friendship with Hemans deepened.
Clarke, Norma. Ambitious Heights. Routledge.
12
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...
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 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...
Literary responses Maria Jane Jewsbury
Following her untimely death, writers such as Felicia Hemans and Elizabeth Barrett Browning expressed regret that the extraordinary powers of MJJ 's mind (particularly remarkable, said Barrett Browning, in a woman) had failed to produce...
Reception L. E. L.
LEL became strongly associated with a highly gendered construction of female poetic vocation. As Virginia Blain has argued, she became (with Hemans , and following their deaths on the cusp of the era) one progenitor...
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
Reception L. E. L.
Several memoirs of LEL circulated after her death, contributing further to the cult of the poetess that had arisen after the death of her alter-ego Felicia Hemans .
Reception L. E. L.
Although LEL died on the cusp of the Victorian period, she was widely read in its early years, and was invoked explicitly by many other writers who followed her, including women poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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