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 to fame in the early 1820s until after her death in the mid 1830s, "Mrs. Hemans" (as she was universally known) maintained an unrivaled position in critical and popular opinion as the premier woman poet of the day. Throughout the nineteenth century, multivolume editions of her works came repeatedly from British and American presses. Today she is remembered only as the author of "The boy stood on the burning deck," a lyric much abused in recitation and parody. She continues virtually to be ignored in literary criticism and history, yet her work deserves attention as one of the major landmarks in the admittedly sparse landscape...