Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
The Monthly Review, though anxious that publicity might not be good for the young poet or her talent, nevertheless estimated her talent highly, found in the title poem the genuine divine fire, and...
Textual Production
Mary Ann Browne
The dedication celebrates her sister as the playmate of my childhood, the companion of my youth, and . . . the friend and blessing of my maturer years.
A posthumous review in the Dublin University Magazine of Sketches from the Antique noted the gravity and rich melody of these poems (their descriptions, it said, apparently with approval, had no dash or storm)...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
This lavishly illustrated gift book was subtitled A Series of Picturesque Scenes of National Character, Beauty, and Costume,
and contributors were often asked to write to existing engravings, as was EBB
for the 1838 issue...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The title piece is a lyrical drama depicting, largely in the form of a conversation between two angels, the crucifixion of Christ. Among the accompanying pieces were several on literary personages or topics: To Mary Russell Mitford
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Shorter pieces here include many sonnets, the most striking and complex of which are perhaps the two dedicated to George Sand
that explore the apparent contradictions of gender and genius. To George Sand. A Desire...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The title of the series was meant to veil EBB
's personal record of her emotions during her epistolary courtship by Browning, the Portuguese invoking the speaker of her earlier poem Catarina to Camoens...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
In September 1847, critic George Gilfillan
followed his treatment of the still very popular and critically distinguished Felicia Hemans
in his series on Female Authors in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine with a piece on EBB
...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The poem is innovative in its blend of novelistic discourse and subject-matter—its depiction of the urban landscape and contemporary social issues including wife-beating and prostitution were indebted to both the English and French novel—with the...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
EBB
's reputation fell sharply after the turn of the century. Virginia Woolf
wittily remarked in the 1930s: fate has not been kind to Mrs Browning as a writer. Nobody reads her, nobody discusses her...
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...
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...
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.
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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
)...
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...
Timeline
No timeline events available.
Texts
Hemans, Felicia. The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy. W. Baxter, 1816.
Hemans, Felicia. The Sceptic. John Murray, 1820.
Hemans, Felicia. The Siege of Valencia. John Murray, 1823.
Hemans, Felicia. The Siege of Valencia. Editors Wolfson, Susan J. and Elizabeth Fay, Broadview, 2002.
Hemans, Felicia. The Vespers of Palermo. John Murray, 1823.
Hemans, Felicia, and Harriet Browne Owen Hughes. The Works of Mrs. Hemans. W. Blackwood, 1839.