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.
One poem here embodies a particularly complex statement of relationship to the earlier tradition of women's writing: Casabianca, whose starting point is the poem of the same title by Felicia Hemans
. Hemans's poem...
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.
qtd. in
Bury, Lady Charlotte. "Alla Giornata"; or, To the Day. Saunders and Otley, 1826, 3 vols.
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...
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.
and contributors were often asked to write to existing engravings, as was EBB
for the 1838 issue...
Intertextuality and Influence
L. M. Montgomery
Her writing, like Emily's, was profoundly influenced by nineteenth-century English writers and poets. LMM
named Hemans
and Byron
in personal letters; Emily cites Tennyson
and Wordsworth
.
Gillen, Mollie. The Wheel of Things. Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1975.
149, 161
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
Mary Catherine Hume
The starting-point for the poem is the tradition (subtly questioned) of Sappho's suicide as an abandoned woman; this fact links the text to other responses to the topic by other women poets including Felicia Hemans
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...
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, 1990.
408, 544, 340
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...
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.
qtd. in
Kobak, Annette. “Mme de Staël and Fanny Burney”. The Burney Journal, Vol.
4
, 2001, pp. 12-35.
19
Corinne was enormously influential for nineteenth-century women writers. The model...
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...
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...
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...
