Felicia Hemans was remarkable for
her popularity and notable for the nationalistic and domestic themes of her
poetry in the Romantic literary era. In her early years of writing and
publication, Hemans, by her own description, modeled her poetry after the work
of other Romantic poets, most of all Lord Byron, and this led to increasing
publication opportunities and income during her career. Indeed, her popularity,
especially among women, actually exceeded Byron’s and many contemporaries’ appeal,
but the combination of her commercial success and her distinctly “feminine” style
– as it was perceived and described by critics of her time – inhibited contemporary
and posthumous critical appreciation of her work. Her writing was acknowledged and
even admired but certainly not embraced by the contemporary literati, and her
focus on nationalistic and domestic themes sent her work into literary and
popular near-obscurity after the mid-1800s.
During the 1980s, Romantic poetry critics
rediscovered Hemans and began excavating her significance within the context of
her era through her biography, including her impressive business acumen and extraordinary
fame, and her contemporary critical reception. This renewed interest after the
extended period of oversight has led to several important publications on
Hemans within the last twenty years, and as these recent works demonstrate, an
overview of her biography and publication history, contemporary reception of Records (her most successful and best
known work), and posthumous publication and reception is necessary to
effectively return Hemans’ to her original context.
1.
Biography & Publication History
Felicia Hemans was born 25 September
1793, the fifth of seven children, to George Browne, a Liverpool merchant, and
Felicity Wagner, the daughter of the Austrian and Tuscan consul. Her father's
business failed around 1800, and the family moved to Wales where she studied
French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and German.
Hemans’s first book, Poems, was
published in 1808 – she was just fourteen years old – by an elderly family
friend, Matthew Nicholson. Two of Felicia's brothers had entered the army to
fight in the Napoleonic wars, informing and inspiring Hemans’s early poetry
that featured heavily nationalistic themes. Also serving in the wars was
Captain Alfred Hemans, a man “considerably her senior.” The Captain and Felicia
met only briefly but formed an intense connection that would lead to their
marriage in 1812. In the meantime, her father left for Quebec in 1811 never to
return, an eerie foreshadowing of her own marriage.
Her second
book, Domestic Affections & Other Poems, was published 1812 also by Nicholson
but ignored critically. After her marriage to Captain Hemans, the new couple
lived in Northamptonshire, where Captain Hemans was adjutant to the local
militia and where, in 1813, their first son was born. After his service, the
three returned to Wales to live with Felicia’s mother, which began a prolific
period for Felicia.
Hemans began to contribute to literary
journals, and in 1816, gained Lord Byron’s (Hemans idolized Byron and modeled
her work after his) publisher John Murray of the Quarterly Review, who
put out her poem Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy. The first edition Murray published
under “by a Lady” in lieu of her name, but the second edition featured her full
name and earned critical and popular success with modest profits. Modern
Greece followed quickly in 1817 and met with favorable reviews from critics
and peers, but Murray reverted to anonymous publication.
In 1818, she debuted in Blackwood’s Magazine. Meanwhile, Captain
Hemans left for Italy, never to return, leaving behind her and their five sons,
all under 6 years of age. She remained in her mother’s house and found increasing
popularity and success. Her poetry became an avenue through which she could
earn a good income and derive personal satisfaction, and this combination was an
exceptional feat for a woman of her time period and spoke to her ability to
sell her work to and negotiate with publishers, though this perspective was
certainly not how she was understood or appreciated during her lifetime.
In 1819, Murray published her fourth book
Tales and Historic scenes, in Verse. Her poem “The Meeting of Wallace and Bruce on the Banks of the
Carron” won a well-known literary \contest, which previously had been the
exclusive domain of male poets, and £50 and was republished and praised. Her
popularity grew significantly in the 1820’s, especially among women readers. Works
of that decade included the verse dramas The Siege of Valencia (1823)
and The Vespers of Palermo (1823), the latter she wrote a script for,
but the play failed terribly in its Covent Garden debut. A few months later it
was produced in Edinburgh (Joanna Baillie was behind the production) and was well
received. Sir Walter Scott wrote a prologue for the Edinburgh performance, but
despite this rally, her second effort, De Chatillon, or The Crusaders,
was unsuccessful.
In January of 1827, Hemans’s mother
passed away, which caused her such profound grief that her physical health was
greatly compromised, leaving her an invalid until her death. She wrote to her
husband and offered to join him in Italy, but he rejected her. This but
especially the death of her mother had great influence on the tone and depth of
her next book Records of Woman and Other Poems. In a letter to
a friend, Hemans wrote, “I have put my heart and individual feelings into it
more than any thing else I have written.” (23 May 1828).
Records
of Woman and Other Poems was published in May 1828 and was her
most successful book. Ten poems of this book were originally published in
serial in New Monthly Magazine leading up to publication of the book. Hemans
previous publisher, Murray, had lost a substantial amount of money in a failed
investment and also did not want Hemans success to overshadow that of his other
writer Lord Byron, his most highly prized poet, and thus, Murray’s financial
advisor Gifford recommended to Hemans in a letter to “take a break,” which
prompted Hemans – as the intelligent business woman that she was – not to “take
a break” but rather broaden her network and approach Blackwood’s to publish Records. As a result, Cadell in London
funded the printing of 1000 copies in Blackwood’s first run. In America, the
book was published in a pirated version in NY and, with help from Andrews Norton,
published legitimately in Boston. Very quickly a second edition was published
in October, also by Blackwood’s, followed by a third edition in 1829. By 1831,
Hemans was earning £2 per page, Blackwood’s highest rate, and a fourth edition
of Records was published in 1833.
Hemans received an advance of £150 for a
second, expanded edition of Forest Sanctuary, which was so successful
that Blackwood’s paid her £100 – a substantial amount for that time – advances
going forward. In addition, Hemans was solicited by “the annuals,” which were ornamental,
gift-style books marketed toward women and generally derided by the contemporary
literati. Hemans took advantage of the opportunity for publication and income,
and nearly one hundred of her poems appeared in the annual “The Keepsake” between
1825 and 1835. In 1827, she began to contribute regularly to Blackwood’s Magazine and negotiated a
higher rate of £1 per page.
Hemans moved to Dublin in 1831 to be near
one of her brothers. She fell into financial difficulty and increasingly poor
health, and when Prime Minister Robert Peel heard about this, he sent her £100
to ease her suffering, which illustrates her fame and national value. At the
age of 41, she died of a weak heart, which may have been rheumatic fever, in
Dublin on May 16, 1835.
2.
Contemporary Reception of Records
Overall, contemporary reception for
Hemans’s work focused much more on her person and treated her obviously
exceptional though “female” intellect as a curiosity, and thus her status as
“authoress” was fraught by gender stereotypes of the time. Due to the
nationalistic and domestic themes of her work, she was hailed as the
representation of the ideal English woman. Around 1820 critic John Wilson
wrote, “Scotland has her Baillie – Ireland her Tighe – England her Hemans,” and
an unsigned review in the July, 1821 edition The British Critic read,
“When a woman can write like this, she ought to write. Her mind is
national property.” In these quotes, the novelty of a woman’s genius during
this era alongside the language of imperialism – “national property” –
demonstrates the effort necessary to compartmentalize Hemans in order for
contemporary critics to appreciate her work.
By the publication of Records in 1828, Hemans was a much more accepted
figure in the literary and publishing world, and her remarkable success
overwhelmed objections to her gender, for the most part, though her gender
continued to delimit appreciation of her work. Francis Jeffrey, an influential
literary critic at the time, wrote a
lengthy review of Records in the October Issue of the Edinburgh
Review that “proved a force in her reception” (Wolfson 549). Jeffrey
spent much of the essay discussing “women” and “women writers” but did conclude
the essay with high praise and predictions of her lasting impression. On
February 12, 1831, an unsigned review appeared in Athnaeum (founded in
1828) that read, “Were there to be a feminine literary house of commons,
Felicia Hemans might very worthily be called to fill the chair as the speaker –
a representative of the whole body, as distinguished from the other estates of
the intellectual realm” (Wolfson 562). This particular quote is
significant in spite of the unknown author, because it illustrates how praise
was juxtaposed with the marginalization of her work to an exclusively female
domain.
Heman’s popularity spread to the United States
with the publication of Records, and
while she certainly was not viewed as “national property,” reception was still
inextricably tied to Hemans’s poetic expressions of “female” characteristics
held as ideal in the States as well as England at the time. Andrews Norton, the
American publisher in Boston who was responsible for bringing Hemans’s work to
the U.S, wrote to her in 1831,
You have favored us a legacy for our
children, who will…think better of the world for the reception it has given to
your poetry. It implies a wider diffusion of delicate and elevated feelings…and
its whole influence is for good—unless it be…that the thrilling expression of
suffering which it sometimes utters, belongs too exclusively to this world.”
Here,
the elevation of woman as the moral and spiritual compass for the world frames
Hemans as the model Victorian “angel-in-the-house” and even the “suffering” seems
to be received by Norton as a flaw, an earthly stain on her otherwise heavenly
– by reversing the logic of his characterization – expressions.
3.
Posthumous Publication, Reception, & Critique of Hemans’s Oeuvre
Hemans’s image as the feminine ideal carried
her fame beyond her death and into the Victorian era. In 1836, Henry F.
Chorley, who was friends with Hemans during her lifetime, wrote and published Memorials
of Mrs. Hemans with the close
involvement and input of her sister, who determined how Hemans was portrayed, especially
her commitment to home and family, the failure of her marriage, and the death
of her mother.
However, her fraught status as
“authoress” continued as critics struggled to satisfactorily categorize both her
gender and her work. In 1847, George Gilfillan, in an essay entitled “Female
Authors. No. I. — Mrs. Hemans” published in the June issue of Tait’s
Edinburgh Magazine and the first
in a series of essays on the history of published women, he wrote,
“We are reluctantly compelled, therefore, to deny her…the name of poet…A maker
she is not….” and later, “…the nature of this poetess is more interesting than
her genius” (Wolfson 596). Gilfillan
claims that her writing is essentially reductive and a lesser version of
Romantic poets – men, of course – that came before her, and thus denies her
status as poet. He does this while also acknowledging her “genius” but still
rating it as less than her “nature,” which illustrates the continued critical
focus on her personhood rather than her poetry.
Similarly, Frederic Rowton, in his book The
Female Poets of Great Britain published
in 1853, wrote,
Her works…I would say that they are intensely
feminine…every page is full of grace, harmony, and expressive glowing beauty.
In nothing can one trace her feminine spirit more strikingly than in her
domestic home-loving ideas….. ….Mrs. Hemans, I repeat, embodies woman's
religious excellence most completely. (386-392)
This
excessive, almost sermon-like commentary is entirely focused on how her writing
exhibits her feminine, Christian qualities; again demonstrating how critical
reception was dominated by Hemans’s supposed embodiment of the Victorian ideal
of woman.
Blackwood’s owned Hemans’s publication
rights, and thus, in 1859, published a volume of her collected works, Poems of Felicia Hemans, including all
her books of poems, miscellaneous poems, and advertisements.
Jane Williams, in The Literary Women
of England published in 1861
featuring a chapter on Hemans, actually took a perspective less concerned with
gender and wrote specifically about Records:
All these poems, founded on facts or
recorded incidents, Mrs. Hemans has made inalienably her own, not by a mere
paraphrastic version, but by the absolute fusion and complete recasting of
material in amalgamation with ore of the richest kind from her own mines.
This
review seems to push back – though there is no indication that this was a
direct response – to Gilfillan’s 1847 denial of Hemans’s status as poet, and
perhaps, as a woman in a literary realm, Williams could more objectively
appreciate the quality of her writing instead of focusing on how to categorize
her within a male-dominated profession.
Unfortunately, female critical voices
were few and far between in the mid-1800s. In 1878, W. M. Rossetti wrote the
“Prefatory Notice” to Poetical Works of Mrs. Hemans and gave extreme
detail on her biography, including a generous section on “the mystery of the
failed marriage” with a lengthy description of her appearance as well as
detailed critique of her most well known books. He concludes, “One might sum up
the weak points in Mrs. Heman’s poetry be saying that it is not only ‘feminine’
poetry…but also ‘female’ poetry: besides exhibiting the fineness and charm of
womanhood, it has the monotone of mere sex” (Wolfson 608). Instead of praising her feminine qualities, he
attributes the weaknesses of her work to the perceived weakness of her sex.
After this point, very few editions of or
critical reception to her work can be found. Notable for its mere existence is an
unpublished doctoral thesis by M.I. Leslie who wrote about Hemans, focusing on
how her mother’s role, administrating the household and helping to care for
Hemans’s five boys, created the freedom of time that was critical to her
success. Not until 1990 with Norma Clark’s Ambitious Heights: Writing,
Friendship, Love, did critical
work on Hemans reemerge in book form. Ambitious Heights focuses
on her connection to the Jewsbury sisters and, by extension, Jane Welsh Carlyle
and also provides a thorough analysis of Records from a primarily
biographical perspective. Also in 1990, The Contours of Masculine Desire:
Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry by Marlon B. Ross was published
in which Ross “examines the ways in which Romanticism has been constructed,
from the Romantic period to the present, as a masculine enterprise. He then
traces the growth of a "feminine" poetic tradition from 1730 to 1830,
showing the importance of this previously neglected tradition.”
In 2000, Susan J. Wolfson edited a
thorough collection of Hemans work, entitled Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems,
Letters, Reception Materials, which
also includes an excellent introduction and detailed “Life in Context.”
In 2001 – ed. Nanora Sweet & Julie Melnyk, Felicia Hemans: Reimagining
Poetry in the 19th Century, Ross wrote the forward, which
investigates how and why she was excluded from the canon when she utilized and
developed poetic traditions and also highlights her business acumen and
presents fresh readings that are more nuanced than the original reception. Most
journal articles in literary magazines share this focus and spawned, it appears,
from work by Ross, Clark, and Wolfson. Clearly, Felicia Hemans and her poetry
will continue to be excavated and increasingly appreciated as literary critics
and historians explore her work in the context of feminism, the debate over
canonization, and her substantial contribution to the body of Romantic and
popular poetry of the early 1800s.
Works Cited
Hemans,
Felicia, ed. Paula R. Feldman. Records of
Woman with Other Poems. Lexington, KY:
The University Press of Kentucky, 1999.
Print.
Rowton,
Frederic. The Female Poets of Great
Britain. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University
Press, 1981. Print.
Wolfson,
Susan. Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems,
Letters, Reception Materials. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2000. Print.
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