Felicia Dorothea Hemans

English poet

• Born: September 25, 1793
• Birthplace: Liverpool, England
• Died: May 16, 1835
• Place of death: Dublin, Ireland

Hemans was one of the most popular poets of the English-speaking world during the nineteenth century and is credited with making contributions to Romantic poetry whose influence was felt throughout the following century.

Early Life

Felicia Hemans (HEHM-ahnz) was born Felicia Dorothea Browne, the daughter of George Browne, a banker and merchant from County Cork, Ireland, and Felicity Wagner of Lancashire. Before Felicia was six, financial problems forced the family to move to Gwrych, near Abergele in Wales, where they lived for nine years in a mansion that looked out over both sea and mountains. When she was thirteen, her father moved to Canada but continued to support his family in Wales. He died when she was nineteen.

Felicia was reading by the age of six and was beginning to write poetry at the age of eight. She had a photographic memory and could recite long passages from what she read. She was educated at home in literature, languages, art, and music. Her home had an extensive library, and she was provided with private tutoring. Thanks to her father’s continental connections and the Italian and Austrian heritage of her mother, she became fluent in French, Italian, and German and then in Spanish, Portuguese, Welsh, and Latin.

Life’s Work

Felicia began the career that would make her the century’s best-selling English poet at the age of fourteen with her collection Poems (1808), which she dedicated to the Prince of Wales. That book’s publication initiated a correspondence between her and Percy Bysshe Shelley—of whom her mother disapproved. Some of Felicia’s poems reflect military themes. Two of her brothers were in the British army’s Twenty-third Royal Welsh Fusiliers, with whom they served in the Peninsular War against France. Felicia’s patriotic enthusiasm can be heard in the martial tones of England and Spain: Or, Valour and Patriotism (1808). Her sister, Harriet Hughes, wrote that for Felicia, the “days of chivalry seemed to be restored.”

In 1809, Felicia’s family moved to Bronwylfa at St. Asaph, Flintshire. Three years later, she published The Domestic Affections. During that same year, 1812, she married Captain Alfred Hemans and then moved to Daventry, where her husband served with the Northamptonshire militia. Following his discharge from military service in 1814, he, Felicia, and their infant son, Arthur Wynne, moved into the home of Felicia’s mother at Bronwylfa. In 1818, the couple separated for reasons that are now unknown. Captain Hemans moved to Rome, leaving a pregnant Felicia a single mother with five sons: Arthur, George Willoughby, Claude Lewis, Henry William, and Charles Isidore.

During Felicia’s years at Bronwylfa, she became celebrated for her poetry. She published widely to critical acclaim and was admired by such literary luminaries as Sir Walter Scott and George Gordon, Lord Byron. During that period, she published The Restoration of Works of Art to Italy (1816), Modern Greece (1817), and Tales and Heroic Scenes (1819). Her fluency in foreign languages led to her publishing Translations from Camöes and Other Poets (1818), which contained her translations from Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and German poems. She also published Welsh Melodies (1822), which demonstrated her talent for writing songs, many of which would be sung in Victorian parlors throughout the nineteenth century.

Encouraged by friends and colleagues, Hemans had her verse drama The Vespers of Palermo produced at Covent Garden in 1823. It played unsuccessfully, possibly because of the incompetence of its lead performer. By contrast, the same play was acclaimed when Harriet Siddons performed in an Edinburgh production, to which Sir Walter Scott and Joanna Baillie lent their support.

Praised in The Quarterly Review by John Taylor Coleridge and celebrated in The Monthly Review as a writer of “high chivalric poetry,” Hemans continued to publish in that vein, with The Siege of Valencia and The Last Constantine (1823) and shorter lyrics, including “Songs of the Cid.” These books were followed by The Forest Sanctuary (1824) and The Lays of Many Lands (1826). The former book praised American religious freedoms and won her a large transatlantic audience.

With her sons, mother, and sister, Hemans moved to Rhyllon, about one mile from Bronwylfa, in the spring of 1825. Her reputation continued to grow, and her works were collected and published in both American and British editions. However, a series of personal tragedies soon began: the deaths of her mother and one of her brothers and the beginning of chest pains, palpitations, and general inflammation that would plague her for the rest of her life.

In 1827, Hemans was offered the editorship of an American periodical but declined it. During that same year, her Hymns on the Works of Nature for the Use of Children was published in Boston. To Joanna Baillie, who had acclaimed the The Vespers of Palermo, she dedicated Records of Women in 1828.

In 1828, Hemans’s sister married, and her brother George moved to Ireland, dispersing the family circle that had been closely knit and of great importance in Hemans’s life. Hemans and her sons moved to Wavertree in the Liverpool area, where she had friends and where she hoped that her new surroundings would prove culturally stimulating and provide educational opportunities for her three youngest sons. Her two eldest sons had gone to live with their father in Rome. However, these hopes went unfulfilled, and she looked back on her peaceful and secure years at Bronwylfa and Rhyllon with nostalgia. Meanwhile, she continued to be sought after as a famous woman (femme celèbre) and was often asked to produce literary works, ranging “from the divinity treatise to the fairy tale,” as her friend and biographer Henry Fothergill Chorley later noted.

Despite Hemans’s disappointments at Wavertree, the locale proved convenient for travel to England’s Lake District and the Lowlands. She made the acquaintance of Dorothy and William Wordsworth, visited Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford, and met Sir Francis Jeffrey, the editor of the Edinburgh Review, who afterward provided glowing notices of her works. When she and her sons needed a quiet place to recuperate from whooping cough, she discovered a sanctuary across the Mersey River at Seacombe.

Rooted in themes initiated as early as 1812, Songs of the Affections (1830) earned Hemans a reputation as the poetess of the affections, of hearth and home. At that time, Hemans considered moving to Edinburgh but was warned off by her physicians, who thought the colder climate there might prove deadly. She instead decided to move to Dublin, where she would be near her brother George. In August, 1831, she made the move to Ireland, where she spent the last four years of her life among family and friends. Hemans’s many friends were concerned that the move to Ireland had proved too taxing for her because it was followed by attacks of “oppression” of the chest and shortness of breath. However, Hemans was determined that her sons should grow up near their uncle, who had become chief commissioner of police in Ireland.

During her last years, Hemans’s reading tastes became more religious, and she enjoyed seventeenth century poetry by writers such as George Herbert. Although her health continued to deteriorate, with episodes of arrhythmias, she continued to write—usually in a reclining position—predominantly on religious themes. During 1834 alone, she published Scenes and Hymns of Life, with Other Religious Poems ; Hymns for Childhood ; and National Lyrics and Songs for Music . During that same year, she also began a new series of critical pieces on continental literature in The New Monthly, but only the first part ever appeared.

Hemans and her sons moved to Redesdale, seven miles outside Dublin, but she soon returned to her Dublin residence to be near her doctors. Completely incapacitated, she died there on May 16, 1835. She was buried in St. Anne’s Church on Dawson Street in Dublin, where she is commemorated by a memorial window and a tablet inscribed with verses from The Siege of Valencia. Her brothers later erected a memorial to her in St. Asaph’s Cathedral with an inscription stating that her “character is best portrayed in her writings.” William Wordsworth elegized her in a poem as “that holy Spirit,/ Mild as the spring, as ocean deep.”

Significance

Felicia Dorothea Hemans contributed works of literature and criticism to many of the major periodicals of her time, including The Edinburgh Annual Register, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the Edinburgh Review, The Literary Gazette, and The New Monthly. She received several literary prizes, was celebrated in Great Britain and America, and was translated on the Continent. She drew her themes from historical episodes, embodied national and imperial pride, and enshrined the domestic affections.

Hemans’s Romantic melancholy was a melancholy overcome by faith and hope. As one of the last Romantics, Hemans, along with Letitia Landon, wrote a vital poetry during the supposed literary “interregnum” between the deaths of Byron, Shelley, and John Keats and the emergence of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, as a major Victorian voice. Although her particular style of writing, which sought to “sound the depths” of the human heart, fell into disfavor with the advent of modernism, leaving her works thereafter unread and unpublished, literary historians have noted that works widely celebrated and in print for one hundred years merit reevaluation. Although her “Casabianca” (also known as “The boy stood on the burning deck”) and “The Stately Homes of England” were favorite recitation pieces, and “The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in America” was sung with the fervor of a hymn, current critical reevaluation of her work opens new perspectives on nineteenth century mentality and sensibilities.

Bibliography

Curran, Stuart. “Women Readers, Women Writers.” In The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, edited by Stuart Curran. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993. An important introduction to women writers of Hemans’s era.

Sweet, Nanora, and Julie Melnyk, eds. Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Collection of significant articles assessing Hemans’s poetry from a variety of perspectives.

Wolfson, Susan J. “’Domestic Affections’ and ’The Spear of Minerva’: Felicia Hemans and the Dilemma of Gender.” In Re-visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776-1837, edited by Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Places Hemans in context and assesses the contradictory gender implications in her works.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. Selection of Hemans’s writings that provides primary materials that are otherwise difficult to find.