Hemans,Felicia, Poetry

Poet and dramatist Felicia Dorothea Browne Hemans (1793–1835) was the sole woman poet of the Romantic period to appear with male contemporaries in canon‐making collections in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The influential ‘pirate’ press of Galignani in Paris produced a one‐volume collection of her work in 1836, reissued in America by a series of Philadelphia and Boston publishers{Poetical Works of Mrs. Felicia Hemans);and Oxford Standard Authors released a collection in 1914. Hemans's final publisher, William Blackwood, produced the collected works in seven volumes and one volume{Works1839,Poems1849). Selections of Hemans's work appeared throughout the Victorian period from standard publishers like Routledge and Moxon (St Clair 2004). Her highly coloured aesthetics fell out of favour under modernism, but feminism and historicism brought a revival of interest in Hemans in the 1980s (Ross 1989; Mellor 1993). Research soon proliferated and is represented here only symptomatically.