Felicia Hemans was one of the highest paid and most critically feted poets of her day,1 but her star has waned since her death, with critics only recently beginning to rediscover her work in the wake of the efforts of Stuart Curran, Susan J. Wolfson, and Norma Clarke, amongst others.2 Hemans published her first poems in 1808 at fourteen years old, poetry that made Shelley long to make her acquaintance, though she and her mother, perhaps wisely, chose not to respond to his somewhat disingenuous invitation. She continued to write throughout her life, despite the breakdown of her marriage and the difficulty of coping with a large family, and her work is highly attuned to its audience, finely wrought, and deeply engaged with self‐fashioning. Records of Woman: With Other Poems stands as her most important achievement.3 In the collection, Hemans imagines, recovers, and rewrites stories of women, from ‘The American Forest Girl’ to ‘Joan of Arc’. The poems featured in the collection are united by suffering, particularly suffering caused by men, who feature as either malicious or inadvertent sources of female misery. Michael Williamson thoughtfully argues that Records of Woman sees Hemans refiguring the elegiac tradition: ‘Instead of responding to death as an occasional intrusion into life, Hemans writes elegiac poems that lament the waste of women’s psychic and imaginative energy on a world tainted by male death, deplore the absence of any commemorative interest in the histories of dead women, and represent dramatically disfiguring subject positions for women mourners.’4 Eschewing self‐pity or anger, Records of Woman creates its dramatic records by adopting various female voices.
Records of Woman was Hemans’s most popular volume, going into four editions from May 1828 to October 1830. The volume was dedicated to Joanna Baillie, the gifted Scottish poet and playwright, and Susan J. Wolfson quotes Hemans’s letter to Mary Russell Mitford where she writes: ‘I have put my heart and individual feelings into it more than in any thing else I have written.’5 Containing nineteen poems and seven scholarly endnotes, Records of Woman joins, as Wolfson notes, the developing genre of ‘women’s lives’,6 but it also enters into dialogues with male peers, from Byron and Shelley to Wordsworth, as Hemans refigures ‘male’ themes through female voices. ‘The Bride of the Greek Isle’ shows Hemans returning to the Greek themes explored in her earlier and overlooked Modern Greece, but she also weaves in allusions to Shelley and Byron. Hellas and Don Juan’s ‘The Isles of Greece’ linger in the poem, but it is Byron’s Tales which are most drastically reconceived. The poem is written largely in heroic couplets like Byron’s Tales, but Hemans changes the form with each spoken section, cross‐rhyming ‘The Bride’s Farewell’ and shortening the lines to tetrameter to create dramatic interest. The poem opens with Eudora’s initially unwilling departure from her mother: ‘She turns to her lover, she leaves her sire’ (84). After the wedding ceremony, the party are attacked by Ottoman pirates. When her husband, Ianthis, passively dies, Eudora builds a funeral pyre and casts herself on top where the admiring narrator asks, ‘could this work be of woman wrought?’ (210). While Hemans’s narrator invokes suttee as the point of reference for Eudora’s suicide, here it seems an act of resistance in the manner of Sardanapalus’ self‐sacrifice (her epigraph is from the play) but purged of the egotism of Byron’s hero. Alert to the political and literary contexts at work in her choice of her heroine and locale, Hemans’s Eudora is the perfected heroine of a Byronic tale.
‘Properzia Rossi’, the most accomplished poem in the collection,7 shows Hemans engaging in a self‐conscious act of doubling where the poet creates Properzia Rossi and Properzia creates her sculpture of Ariadne. Properzia openly avows her intention to channel herself into her artistic creation, Ariadne, and the haunting question becomes how far Hemans uses her artistic creation with the same intention. Properzia Rossi was a highly gifted and regarded artist; Ariadne, despite assisting her beloved Theseus and saving his life, was abandoned by him as he sailed away from Crete. Both of these figures reveal Hemans’s care in her selection of her protagonists. In Hemans’s poem, Properzia too has been abandoned, suggesting an oblique identification between Properzia and Ariadne, and a subtle biographical link between Properzia and Hemans. Hemans had been deserted by her husband for a new life in Italy, a trauma which was, as Norma Clarke argues, ‘the central event in her life as a woman artist’.8 The poem reveals the intoxication of and the ultimate disappointment of art, as the ‘bright work’ cannot make up for the pain of such romantic loss even as creative potency ripples through the poem.
Written in couplets that in places recall Shelley’s Epipsychidion, ‘Properzia Rossi’ disrupts the smoothness of the iambic beat to make it more jaggedly reflective of human speech. Like Shelley, however, Hemans uses the ‘I’ to lyrical, even vertiginous effect. This ‘keenly performative’ ekphrastic verse shows Hemans entering into Properzia’s creative process.9 Hemans lays bare the artistic triumph and personal defeat of the artist. Her work aims to be ‘this farewell triumph’ (1.8) to be held against her vain love. Seeking to place her soul into her art, Properzia aims to affect her lover deeply, providing him with proof of her devotion. Angela Leighton’s description of the speaker, ‘a courtesan in her art, displaying her emotional wares to the imagined eye of her lover’, suggests a deliberate tension in the poem.10 Disturbing any sense of art as ‘Cold Pastoral’ (Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ 45), as Grant F. Scott shows, ‘Hemans creates a profoundly mortal image, sensuous and impermanent, imbued with the fragility of its human creator. The poem returns ekphrasis to its classical origins, showing its artwork in the process of creation and privileging the voice over the perpetuity of the visual image; Hemans ensures that the object “speak out” in the warm words of its creator.’11 Art as a self‐delighting and self‐sufficing power comes into conflict with the artist’s intention, where the failure of the latter does not affect the success of the former, but shows art slip out of the controlling artist’s hands to shine with aesthetic rather than personal glory. Though the voice is privileged, it is the monument that will remain to communicate Properzia’s soul ‘When its full chords are hush’d’ (4.123).
The power of art is unambiguously celebrated by Hemans in ‘Properzia Rossi’; though art is unable to heal personal wounds, its magnificence remains:
…Yet once again
I greet it proudly, with its rushing train
Of glorious images:—they throng—they press—
A sudden joy lights up my loneliness,—
I shall not perish all! (2.28–32)
As Properzia celebrates the ‘glorious images’ that rise before her, Hemans becomes a spectral double of her creation. It is Hemans’s ‘rushing train’ of images that is captured in poetry that demands the immortality of the artist through her art. Hemans catches the creative joy experienced by Properzia in her artistic process, her imaginative prowess. Yet this is coupled with anxiety, as where she laments the limits of her chosen art form: ‘Oh! could I throw / Into thy frame a voice, a sweet, and low, / And thrilling voice of song!’ (2.49–51). Sculpture lacks voice, but the ‘thrilling voice of song’ suggests Hemans’s own concerns. Left ‘Too much alone’ (3.66), Properzia lacks the audience for which she longs and the support needed by the artist. By the final section, the fame and glory of the artwork mock the artist who sought to be a lover:
Worthless fame!
That in his bosom wins not for my name
Th’ abiding place it ask’d! Yet how my heart,
In its own fairy world of song and art,
Once beat for praise!—Are those high longings o’er?
That which I have been can I be no more? (4.81–6)
Painfully admitting that her art cannot win the affections of her lover, the rhyme of ‘heart’ and ‘art’ seems bitterly ironic. Yet more troubling is the lack of interest in the audience for whom the ‘fairy world of song and art’ had once been created. Seeming to recall Wordsworth’s line, ‘The things which I have seen I now can see no more’ (9) from ‘Ode. Intimations of Immortality’, Properzia’s loss shows how Hemans aligns her with the poet’s own contemporaries. Properzia rallies to discover an ‘abundant recompence’ (‘Tintern Abbey’, 89) of the kind that characterizes Wordsworth’s most affecting poetry. The images of the love she desperately recollects are united by memories of silence. In her longing to watch the sky without speaking, to listen silently to music, to gaze on art, Properzia dreams of being an appreciator of art rather than an artist herself. For her, ‘This had been joy enough’ (5.117), but she continues to imagine that such silence would feed her art, and then she would sculpt perfectly, and make her fame ‘A glory for thy brow’ (5.120). Avowing that such hopes are ‘dreams’, a quiet acceptance closes the poem, where Properzia’s ambition is reduced to hoping that her lover will remember her because of her art. This solving acceptance is suggested by the final lines’ firm masculine rhyme. Susan Wolfson refers to the poem as revealing a ‘calculus of heart and art’,12 and Properzia’s self‐fashioning melds the glory of her art with a profound understanding of her own necessary failure. ‘Properzia Rossi’ is a celebration and a lament for the lot of the female artist. The ‘deep thrill’ (5.122) of the lines lies in Hemans’s doubling between Ariadne and Properzia, and between Properzia and Hemans herself.
‘Imelda’ and ‘Gertrude, or Fidelity till Death’ shows Hemans using historical figures that she reanimates, using their stories to draw out the female fidelity and bravery displayed by her characters. Yet such agony does not go rewarded in the poems, with Imelda’s death and Gertrude’s pain availing them nothing. The ‘Indian Woman’s Death Song’ is marked by clear allusions to Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 4 and Shelley’s Alastor, but Hemans carefully feminizes their poetry, turning an historical account of infanticide into a protest against and a considered response to ‘woman’s weary lot’ (36). The poem opens with an irregular and unrhymed fifteen‐line stanza that carefully refuses the sonnet form. It then transforms into seven quatrains of heptameter couplets, borrowing its form from Chapman’s translation of Homer’s Iliad.13 Hemans’s confident long lines stretch out the Indian woman’s lamentation, where her misery gains part of its pathos from its triumphant embrace of coming destruction. ‘Pauline’ also draws on historical fact, but Hemans intensifies the story from a tale of maternal sacrifice where Pauline saves her daughter from a fire to having both mother and daughter die in the blaze. Maternal courage comes to the fore, but in the final lines, Hemans insists on the necessity of belief: ‘Oh! we have need of patient faith below, / To clear away the mysteries of such wo!’ (89–90). Rather than seeming a trite response to tragedy, this couplet makes faith seem like the only possible response to pain, with the unspoken alternative being only an endless agony of grief. In ‘Juana’ and ‘Costanza’ Hemans underscores the injustice to which both women were subject. Juana, who had been carelessly treated by her husband because ‘I am not fair like thee’ (25), attempts to win affection from the already dead man: ‘I have but a woman’s heart, wherewith thy heart to seek’ (28). As Susan Wolfson notes, the heptameter couplets are arranged into quatrains, as in ‘The Indian Woman’s Death Song’ and the ‘Sicilian Captive’, suggesting that Hemans creates a formal link between such songs of feminine despair.14 The poem creates a dichotomy between Costanza as a physical figure and as an ideal abstraction, as Michael T. Williamson shows: ‘Costanza’s bodily presence as a woman thus hovers beneath her saintly aura and her role as an abstraction; Cesario’s breath both exalts and effaces the ideal of saintly feminine forgiveness.’15 The ‘solemn fervour’ (11) announced early on in the poem reveals the paradox Hemans creates, where Costanza is both a woman and an archetype of female mercy. Hemans also deliberately mingles the physical with the metaphysical in her presentation of her protagonist in ‘Joan of Arc, in Rheims’. While retaining Joan of Arc’s power, Hemans domesticates her subject as she imagines Joan’s infancy, rural background, and longing to return to a time of such innocence. Though Hemans allows ‘The crown of glory unto woman’s brow’ (94), she insistently combines the real woman with the political myth; power and femininity vie for importance in her poem.
Childhood as the locus amoenus of joy reverberates through many other poems in the volume. ‘The American Forest‐Girl’ links youth to virtue in a manner suggestive of Wordsworth’s ‘My Heart Leaps Up’, as the young female child’s pity convinces the group of ‘red warriors’ (4) to free their European captive. But it is in ‘Madeline, A Domestic Tale’, ‘arguably the most autobiographical poem in this self‐revealing collection’,16 that infancy and the mother–daughter bond become vitally important. After Madeline’s husband dies before Madeline reaches him in America, she longs to return home to her mother: ‘This voice echoes many such regressive Romantic longings – ones heard in Shelley, Wordsworth, and Keats, whose texts often involve images of maternal nurture. But Hemans’s conception is a more specific fantasy of the actual maternal home, and Madeline’s yearning for the “true and perfect love” (149) of its care evokes a gender‐specific paradise lost.’17 Romantic love comes a poor second to the domestic bliss of the maternal home, and Madeline’s instinct is not to find a new husband, but to remain with her mother. Hemans’s heroic couplets wistfully record loss as the pentameter elegiacally captures pain with stoic forbearance:
… Alas! we trace
The map of our own paths, and long ere years
With their dull steps the brilliant lines efface,
On sweeps the storm, and blots them out with tears. (47–50)
The felt loss in the lines hints at a speaker alive to and empathetic of the suffering of Madeline. Longing for home is neither ironized nor lamented by Hemans’s speaker. Madeline’s mother heroically rescues her child, sailing to the new world to bring her child safely back to the domestic sphere where ‘Peace will be ours beneath our vines once more’ (102). The bond between women becomes the unbreakable tie far beyond that of marriage, and ‘The Memorial Pillar’ reinforces this when mother and daughter rejoin one another after death, and Hemans’s ‘gender‐specific paradise lost’ comes in the afterlife, if not in this one.
Records of Woman seeks to represent female experience, attempting to give a voice to her chosen women throughout culture and history. Experimenting with genre, form, and voice, using famous and anonymous speakers, the collection reveals Hemans’s subtle ability to imagine experience and channel her own experience into the voices of others. ‘The Lost Pleiad’ shows Hemans making poetic capital of Byron’s and Shelley’s poetry to make even her most allusive moments absolutely her own, as Michael O’Neill argues: ‘Hemans’s poem is sumptuously musical, yet self‐aware, attentive, sorrowful and courageous, equal to the challenge presented by “glory from the heavens departed”’.18 Complex and self‐conscious, Hemans’s Records of Woman is a major Romantic achievement.