Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Felicia Hemans
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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.
Felicia Hemans
(whose work is warmly praised in it, in a piece called The Record of Poetry)
Woodring, Carl Ray. Victorian Samplers: William and Mary Howitt. University of Kansas Press, 1952.
22
admired the volume's feeling and beauty enough to write to MH
and tell her so, thereby...
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
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
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...
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
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
...
Literary responses
Lydia Howard Sigourney
Edgar Allan Poe
's review of the US version in Graham's Magazine withdrew the charge of imitating Hemans
that he had formerly levelled at LHS
. She had now, he felt, found her own voice.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
183
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
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...
Literary responses
Lydia Howard Sigourney
Literary historian Emily Stipes Watts
and others have noted Sigourney's high reputation in her own day (the female Milton, the American Hemans, the sweet singer of Hartford, generally ranked higher than William Cullen Bryant
Literary responses
Joanna Baillie
The Chief Justice of Ceylon, Sir Alexander Johnstone
, asked that two of JB
's last plays be translated into Singalese.One—The Bride, A Tragedy (published in summer 1828), had a Singalese subject.
Quarterly Review. J. Murray.
38 (1828): 602
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, 27 Oct. 1879.
She was...
Literary responses
Mary Ann Browne
The Monthly Review, though anxious that publicity might not be good for the young poet or her talent, nevertheless estimated her talent highly, found in the title poem the genuine divine fire, and...
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...
