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.
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 Leaves from the Unpublished Journals, Letters, and Poems of Charlotte Elliott.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
Textual Features
Barbara Hofland
The story concerns an actual Spanish boy in Texas, and contrasts good and bad Indians. The Choctaws befriend Manuel, but the Camanches, whose very nature seems imbued with cruelty,
Feminist Companion Archive.
carry him into captivity...
Residence
Mary Ann Browne
The coincidence of her birth surname with that of Felicia Hemans
, combined with her time in Liverpool, made many people suppose that the two were sisters: an idea encouraged by a complimentary sonnet, The...
Reception
Mary Russell Mitford
She contacted several people (including the novelist Lady Dacre
and the Whig hostess and diarist Lady Holland
) for support in her application, which was fuelled by the examples of the pensions granted to Sydney Morgan
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...
Reception
Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan
Lord Melbourne
offered Sydney, Lady Morgan
, a Crown pension of three hundred pounds a year; she gladly accepted. She had been a close and supportive friend of Melbourne's first wife, Lady Caroline Lamb
...
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
.
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
Reception
Mary Boyle
The poem MB
contributed, My Father's at the Helm, attracted a considerable amount of attention, and achieved some popularity.
Boyle, Mary. Mary Boyle. Her Book. Editor Boyle, Sir Courtenay Edmund, E. P. Dutton; John Murray.
xvi
It presents an allegory of life in which the father is God, and the...
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...
Reception
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
During a visit to England EWW
was honoured by her London publishers, Gay and Hancock
, with a luncheon of sixty men—publishers, editors, bookmen of all kinds, newspaper men, and some invited guests from other...
Publishing
Margaret Holford
In October 1830 Margaret Hodson, formerly Holford, was solicited by Baillie for contributions to the ongoing series of prose-and-verse miscellanies edited by M. Corbett
and her five sisters. (The first volume, The Odd Volume...
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...