Felicia Hemans (1793–1835)

Felicia Hemans, née Felicia Dorothea Browne, was born in Liverpool where she was the fourth of six children in her family to survive infancy. The failure of her father’s wine merchant business led the family to leave Liverpool when she was seven for Gwrych near Abergele in North Wales, and her father left the family to emigrate to Canada in 1810, dying two years later. Hemans’s mother encouraged Felicia’s budding poetic gift. She read avidly, studying several languages along with music and art, and her first collection of poetry (Poems) was released in 1808, when she was fourteen years old. The small financial success of the volume paid for her education, and foreshadowed Hemans’s future need to support herself and her family. Poems, sold by subscription, was subscribed to by her future husband, Captain Alfred Hemans. The couple first met in 1810 and their relationship developed after he returned from the war in 1811. Hemans’s second collection, England and Spain; or, Valour and Patriotism (1808), a long poem in heroic couplets, revealed her patriotic sense of national pride as she wrote, in part, in support of her brothers George and Henry, who were serving as officers in the Peninsular War. Hemans married in 1812, when her third collection, The Domestic Affections &c, was released.

Despite a disappointing lack of notice Hemans continued to write, and her poem, The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy (1816), was praised by Byron, which attracted Murray to purchase it for a second edition. Murray became her publisher, and in 1817 Modern Greece met with some acclaim, but in 1818, for reasons that are unclear, Captain Hemans left behind his family (with Hemans pregnant with their fifth child) for Italy. His abandonment of his family echoed her father’s, and became one of the most significant events of her life, as Susan Wolfson notes in her introduction to Hemans’s poetry: ‘[t]he idealism of heart and home for which “Mrs. Hemans” would become famous was haunted by these desertions, even as the Captain’s departure strengthened her determination to support her family with her writing.’1 Hemans’s writing went from strength to strength, with its promotion of domestic virtues balanced against melancholy and defiant strains.

By the 1820s, Hemans was beginning to establish herself as a major poetic voice. The Siege of Valencia enjoyed praise from many quarters, including the Tory journals that boosted her stature despite their distaste for female writers.2 With work published in significant journals, magazines, and annuals, Hemans’s fame spread, and The Forest Sanctuary &c (1825 and 1829), in which the titular poem focused on the Spanish Inquisition, also suggestively alluded to contemporary political events, such as Catholic Emancipation, an issue about which Byron had spoken to the House of Lords.3 Her long poem, written in a variation of the Spenserian stanza, earned praise for its depictions of suffering, but it is Records of Woman: With Other Poems (1828) that is most widely praised by modern critics. Songs of the Affections, with Other Poems (1830) contains ‘Corinne at the Capitol’, in which Hemans hints at her own unhappiness despite her fame: ‘Happier, happier far than thou / With the laurel on thy brow, / She that makes the humblest hearth / Lovely but to one on earth!’ (45–8). Her late poems show Hemans becoming a still finer poet, as ‘The Lost Pleiad’ confidently alludes to Byron and Shelley’s poetry. Hemans became seriously ill in 1834 and died within months, in 1835, at forty‐one years of age, eight years after her beloved mother. Though Hemans’s star began to wane in the late Victorian period, recent decades have seen critics re‐exploring her poetic achievement.

Source

Nanora Sweet, ‘Hemans, Felicia Dorothea (1793–1835)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/12888, accessed 2 March 2015]; Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793–1835): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/12888; Susan J. Wolfson, ‘Introduction,’ in Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials, ed. Susan Wolfson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. xiii–xxvii.

Biography

  1. H. F. Chorley, Memorials of Mrs Hemans with illustrations of her literary character from her private correspondence, 2 vols (London: Saunders and Otley, 1836).

Notes