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.
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.
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.
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
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...
Performance of text
Clara Balfour
CB
also spoke frequently on literature, focussing on women writers. In her lecture entitled The Female Poets of England, delivered at the opening of the eighteenth session of the Cheltenham Literary and Philosophical Institution
Author summary
Maria Abdy
MA
, whose work spans the Romantic and Victorian periods, was a poet who wrote wittily on religious and secular topics, and was an early champion of the governess. With Felicia Hemans
, she was...
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...
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
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...