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.
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
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.
Clarke, Norma. Ambitious Heights. Routledge.
12
Scholar Norma Clarke
argues that the book's interests in the incompatibility...
Textual Features
Maria Jane Jewsbury
The second story, The History of a Nonchalant is an early fictional treatment of religious doubt as suffered by its intellectual male protagonist, Charles. He travels to Rome, where he marries an Italian poet...
Textual Features
Maria Jane Jewsbury
Jewsbury's anonymity enables her to leave her personal friendship with Hemans out of the picture. She distinguishes between male poetic power and female poetic beauty in a manner that goes back to Burke
's Origin...
Literary responses
Maria Jane Jewsbury
Following her untimely death, writers such as Felicia Hemans
and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
expressed regret that the extraordinary powers of MJJ
's mind (particularly remarkable, said Barrett Browning, in a woman) had failed to produce...
Friends, Associates
Geraldine Jewsbury
GJ
encountered a strong female literary role model early in life, when at sixteen she summered in Wales with her siblings, staying in a cottage not far from that of Felicia Hemans
and her family...
Travel
Maria Jane Jewsbury
MJJ
rented a cottage outside Rhyl near St Asaph in Wales, for herself, her sister Geraldine
, and her brothers, intending to cultivate her friendship with Felicia Hemans
, who lived about a mile away.
Fryckstedt, Monica Correa. “The Hidden Rill: The Life and Career of Maria Jane Jewsbury, I”. Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, Vol.
66
, No. 2, The Library, pp. 177-03.
198
Espinasse, Francis, and Francis Espinasse. “Maria Jane Jewsbury”. Lancashire Worthies: Second Series, Simpkin, Marshall; John Heywood, pp. 323-39.
328
Howe, Susanne. Geraldine Jewsbury: Her Life and Errors. George Allen and Unwin.
14
Dedications
Maria Jane Jewsbury
MJJ
published her second volume of poetry, Lays of Leisure Hours, dedicated to Felicia Hemansin remembrance of the summer passed in her society.
Jewsbury, Maria Jane. Lays of Leisure Hours. J. Hatchard.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Publishing
Maria Jane Jewsbury
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
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...
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...
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.
408, 544, 340
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
.
Reception
L. E. L.
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