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.
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)...
Literary responses
Laetitia Pilkington
Wordsworth
chose from her works eleven melancholy and religious couplets from Sorrow, for inclusion in his manuscript anthology presented to Lady Mary Lowther
at Christmas 1819. He omitted the later part of the poem...
Literary responses
Mary Tighe
As soon as it was brought to public attention (as the work of a woman who had died tragically young), Psyche attracted a rush of attention. The Quarterly Review accorded Tighe high praise as being...
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...
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...
Literary responses
Laura Riding
Critic Jerome McGann
asserts that LR
, while making no claim to transcendent poetic power, makes poetry out of her own power to rise above her subject. In this he associates her with Felicia Hemans
Literary responses
Isabella Neil Harwood
Reviewers of the volume hailed INH
as a poet and an artist and recognized the same characteristics that had earned her other publications so much praise: purity, high thinking, and freedom from extravagance.
“Mr. Ross Neil’s New Poems”. Pall Mall Gazette, No. 4580.
She was...
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
...
ER
's reputation stood high at her death, though it was subject to the ambivalence commonly met with by women writers at this period. The anonymous memoirist on her began by contradicting the barbarous opinion...
Literary responses
Ann Hawkshaw
In a review for the Athenæum, George Walter Thornbury
stated abruptly that AH
's collection has at least two merits,—it has no Preface and it has a purpose. Finding that the sonnets do not...
Literary responses
Jane Williams
Charles Hemans
, Felicia Hemans
's youngest son, wrote JW
to thank her for raising a worthy monument to his mother.
Fraser, Maxwell. “Jane Williams (Ysgafell) 1806-1885”. Brycheiniog, Vol.
7
, pp. 95-114.
108
He also praised the rest of the work for its elevating influences.
Fraser, Maxwell. “Jane Williams (Ysgafell) 1806-1885”. Brycheiniog, Vol.
7
, pp. 95-114.
108
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...
Literary responses
Mary Russell Mitford
MRM
's plays were admired by Maria Edgeworth
, Joanna Baillie
, and Felicia Hemans
, though John Genest
(in Some Account of the English Stage, from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830, 1832), judged them dull.
Literary responses
Frances Browne
In the Dictionary of Literary BiographyMarya DeVoto
noted the interest in The Star of Attéghéi (and other poems in the volume) in the idea of exile, and the elegaic tone that pervades the volume...