When Felicia Hemans's Dartmoor won the Royal Society of Literature's poetry prize for 1821, her eldest son exclaimed, "Now I am sure mamma is a better poet than Lord Byron!" Many in the next decades were to take the comparison seriously. From her rise...

SENTIMENTAL SHE MAY HAVE BEEN, BUT FELICIA HEMANS' VICTORIAN CRITICS seemed most struck, and most impressed, by her consistent lack of passion. "She is no sibyl, tossed to and fro in the tempest of furious excitement," writes George Gilfillan in 1849, "but ever...

Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials. Edited by Susan J. Wolfson. (Princeton University Press, 2000) Pp. xl /+ 633. "I do not despise Mrs. Hemans," Byron wrote in 1820, "but if she knit blue stockings instead of wearing them it...

In the following essay, Wolfson contends that contradictions in Hemans's poetry stemmed from the fundamental conflict between the ideals of her verse—domestic serenity and feminine status quo—and the facts of her life, which required her to carry out the more traditionally masculine work of supporting her family and building a public reputation.

In the following excerpt, the author reviews Hemans's writings in the context of the then just-published Memorials collected by Henry Chorley, which the reviewer rejects as too trivializing of Hemans as a poet.

In the essay below, Lootens investigates the patriotism in Hemans's verse and, through this, the contradictions and complexities that underlay Victorian ideology.