Felicia Hemans (1793-1835)

Abstract Felicia Hemans was one of the most highly influential and widely read poets of the nineteenth century, both in Britain and America. Lord Byron considered Hemans’s Restoration ef the U/c:lrks ef Art to Italy (1816) “a good poem-very” even though he blasted her Modern Greece (1817) as the work of someone who had never been there. Hemans became a regular contributor to periodicals, and her work was ubiquitous in the literary annuals. The Forest Sanctuary, and other Poems (1825) did well, but Records efU/c:lman (1828), a feminist rethinking of history and woman’s artistic expression, was a best-seller. In a similar vein, Hemans’s sonnets on female Biblical figures highlight the presence of women in the development of Western Culture.