She met the tempest, meekly brave,
Then turn’d o’erwearied to the grave.
Perhaps the most popular woman poet throughout the century. ‘The Homes of England’ has now effectively disappeared into Noel Coward’s exuberant parody – ‘The stately homes of England, / How beautiful they stand, / To prove the upper classes / Have still the upper hand …’ Born Felicia Dorothea Browne, in Liverpool, fifth child of a successful Irish merchant. In 1807 her first volume of poems was printed; in 1812 married an army officer, Captain Hemans, by whom she had five sons before he left her in 1818. Wrote profusely, over a wide range, dealing with Biblical and historical material (Byron derided her writings on Greece); William Rossetti later criticized her poetry for its ‘cloying flow of right-minded perceptions of moral and material beauty’. An exponent of the developing Victorian myth of the pure, long-suffering woman, her Records of Woman provided a series of moral-sentimental stories of virtuous female suffering.
Works of Felicia Dorothea Hemans (London, 1839).