DOCSLIB.ORG

28 Felicia Hemans.Pdf

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
28 Felicia Hemans.Pdf <Felicia Hemans Felicia Hemans was one of the most widely read and influential poets of the nineteenth century. Her work, as popular in America as in Britain, was ad­ mired by Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, Lady Morgan, Matthew Arnold, William Michael Rossetti, Marian Evans (George Eliot), Elizabeth Barrett, and countless other writers and literary critics of discerning taste. It continued to be widely anthologized, set to music, quoted, illustrated by artists, ensconced in tooled leather bindings, and made the subject of school recitations well into the twentieth century. Oxford University Press published a volume of her collected works in 1914. Felicia Dorothea Browne was born at n8 Duke Street, Liverpool, on 25 September 1793, to Felicity Dorothea Wagner, daughter of the imperial and Tuscan consul at Liverpool, and George Browne, an Irish merchant. As a child she was an avid reader in the family's extensive library. When she was seven, her father suffered a financial setback and, for economy's sake, the family left Liverpool, at that time a bustling trade center, for an old, spacious mansion called Gwrych near Abergele, North Wales, poised among rocky hills overlooking the sea. The sights and sounds of this lonely and beautiful landscape appear frequently in Hemans's poetry. Although she visited Lon­ don while still a child, in the winters ofI804 and 1805, she did not enjoy it and never returned. Her mother taught her English grammar, French, draw­ ing, and music; a local clergyman taught her Latin, ruing "that she was not a man to have borne away the highest honors at college!" 1 She taught herself Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and German. At the age offourteen Hemans published by subscription with the London firm of Cadell and Davies a handsome quarto volume simply titled Poems. One of the 978 subscribers was handsome Captain Alfred Hemans of the I. Henry Fothergill Chorley, Memorials of Mrs. Hemans, with Illustrations of her Literary Character from her Private Correspondence, 2 vols. (London, 1836), I: 17. 275 Felicia Hemans Fourth Regiment. England and Spain; or, valour and Patriotism, also an ap­ prentice book, came out the same year and expresses her enthusiasm for the Peninsular Campaign, in which two of her brothers served as members of the Twenty-third Royal Welsh Fusiliers. Percy Bysshe Shelley, having heard of Felicia Browne from his cousin, Thomas Medwin, a subscriber to Poems, wrote to her hoping to initiate a friendship, but she rebuffed him. In 1809 her family moved to Bronwylfa, near St. Asaph in Flintshire, in the valley of the Clwyd. Before leaving for the front in Spain, Captain Hemans declared his love; despite her family's disapproval of the match, the couple married after his return three years later, on 30 July 18I2, shortly before the publication of The Domestic Affections, and Other Poems, a book ignored by the review­ ers. Captain Hemans was appointed adjutant to the Northamptonshire Local Militia, and the couple moved to Daventry, where their first son, Arthur, was born. Soon afterwards, however, the Northamptonshire Militia disbanded and the young family went to live with her mother in Bronwylfa. Three more sons followed in quick succession. Shortly before Hemans gave birth to their fifth son in September 1818, her husband left her. Although the two ex­ changed letters and consulted about their children, they seem to have come to a mutual agreement to live apart. Her failed marriage remained through­ out her life a source of such intense embarrassment that she would never speak of it. During the six years of her married life she produced not only five children but three major books. Byron told John Murray that he con­ sidered Hemans's Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy (1816) "a good poem­ very," but he condemned her Modern Greece (1817) as "Good for nothing­ written by some one who had never been there." 2 Still, Hemans garnered increasing recognition. She sent Walter Scott a poem inspired by Wciverley, and he published it in the Edinburgh Annual Reg­ ister for 1815. In 1819 "The Meeting of Wallace and Bruce on the Banks of the Carron" won a prize of fifty pounds and was published in the September issue of Blackwood's Magazine. 3 One of her rivals in the competition - James Hogg, "the Ettrick Shepherd" -admitted that her entry was "greatly superior 2. See Byron to Murray, 30 September r816 and 4 September r8r7, in "So late into the night," vol. 5 of Byron's Letters and journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (London, 1976), ro8, 262. She owned a small lock of Byron's hair, which she wore in her favorite brooch until she was disillusioned by reviews of Thomas Moore's Life of Byron (1830) and called the poet "the wreck of what might have been" ([Harriett Hughes], "Memoir of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Hemans;' in The Works of Mrs. Hemans; with a Memoir of her Life, by her Sister, [ed. Harriett Hughes], 7 vols. [Edinburgh and London, 1839], l :227). 3. Her stanzas on the "Death of the Princess Charlotte" had appeared in Blackwood's the previous April. Felicia Hemans 277 both in elegance of thought and composition. Had I been constituted the judge myself, I would have given hers the preference by many degrees." 4 The Quarterly Review for October 1820 published an appreciative four-year retrospective review of Hemans's work by William Gifford, and in June 1821 she won the fifty-guinea prize of the Royal Society of Literature for the best poem on Dartmoor. In the same year, she composed her Welsh Melodies, re­ creations of Welsh history and translations of Welsh poems set to music. They remained popular as songs for more than a hundred years. Most of her whimsical poems were never published, though the "Miner­ alogist" poems reproduced below survive to show her comic side. A writer for the Edinburgh Monthly Review, reviewing Hemans's Tales, and Historic Scenes (1819), thought her poetry possessed "an exquisite airiness and spirit, with an imagery which quite sparkles;' and admired her "vivacity and fertility of imagination" as well as her "sublime eloquence." 5 In the spring of 1820 Hemans met Bishop Reginald Heber, who became her mentor and encour­ aged her to write plays. Hemans's own favorite playwrights were Coleridge, whose "Remorse" she admired, andJoannaBaillie, whose "Ethwald" and "The Family Legend" were early favorites. She particularly liked Baillie's heroines, about whom she said, "Nothing in all her writings delights me so much as her general idea of what is beautiful in the female character. There is so much gentle fortitude, and deep self-devoting affection in the women whom she portrays, and they are so perfectly different from the pretty 'un-idea'd girls,' who seem to form the beau ideal of our whole sex in the works of some modern poets." 6 Later, in 1827, the two poets corresponded and became close friends. John Murray published The Siege of "Valencia; A Dramatic Poem. The Last Constantine: with Other Poems in the summer of 1823; it contains "The Voice of Spring," a poem set to music and sung by wandering minstrels. Hemans's five-act tragedy, The Vespers of Palermo, was produced at Heber's urging at Covent Garden on 12 December 1823, with Charles Kemble playing the tor­ tured hero, Procida. Based on a historical incident, the play contained two strong female heroes and concerns itself with the struggle for freedom in a plot mixing love and violence. It closed after only one night; however, at Joanna Baillie's urging, Walter Scott persuaded Sarah Siddons to stage it in Edinburgh the following April, where, with an epilogue by Scott delivered by Siddons, it played successfully. In 1823 Hemans began contributing to the New Monthly Magazine, edited by Thomas Campbell, where her "Lays of Many Lands" first appeared, and in 4. Quoted in Peter W Trinder, Mrs. Hemans (Cardiff, 1984), 19. 5. 2 (August 1819): 207. 6. [Hughes), "Memoir," 69. Felicia Hemans 1827 she became a regular contributor to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. In 1825 she brought out The Forest Sanctuary; and Other Poems, the title work of which she considered one of her best. Written in the laundry, the only quiet place in the house, its stanza is a variation of Spenser's. A Spanish hero flees religious persecution during the sixteenth century and finds refuge with his child in a North American forest. Marian Evans called the book "exquisite." 7 Professor Andrews Norton of Harvard University, who with the critic Andrew Peabody ranked Hemans's work above that of Milton and Homer, asked permission to superintend the publication of a complete edition of her works in Boston, and in 1826 the publishing firm of Hilliard, Gray, Little, and Wilkins brought out The League ef the Alps, The Siege ef Valencia, The Vespers of Palermo, and Other Poems. It was in this book that "Casabianca" first appeared. For the next hundred years, school children would be asked to recite this poem, which actually is a critique of the obedience to patriarchal authority that it seems most to extoll. "The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers" was also a favorite of her American audience, with whom her poetry became so popu­ lar that scores of imitators sprang up. Hymns on the Works ef Nature, for the Use of Children followed in 1827, appearing first in America and only six years later in Britain. Norton reprinted The Forest Sanctuary in 1827 and Records of Woman in 1828. When her eldest brother married in the spring of 1825, Hemans moved with her sons, her mother, and her unmarried sister, Harriett (who would later write an early biography of the poet), to a house called Rhyllon, a quarter-mile away just across the River Clwyd.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Introduction
    Introduction The Ladies, I should tell you, have been dealing largely and profitably at the shop of the Muses. And the Hon. Mrs. Norton ... has been proving that she has some of the true ink in her veins, and has taken down several big boys in Mr. Colburn's Great Burlington School. Mrs. Hemans, too, has been kindly noticed by Mr. Murray, and has accomplished the difficult feat of a second edition. Apollo is beginning to discharge his retinue of sprawling men-servants, and to have handmaids about his immortal person, to dust his rays and polish his bow and fire-irons. If the great He- Creatures intend to get into place again, they must take Mrs. Bramble's advice, and "have an eye to the maids." -John Hamilton Reynolds (1832) Although their influence and even their existence has been largely unac­ knowledged by literary scholars and critics throughout most of the twentieth century, women poets were, as their contemporary John Hamilton Reynolds nervously acknowledged, a force to be reckoned with in early-nineteenth­ century Britain.1 Not only Felicia Hemans and Caroline Norton but Letitia Elizabeth Landon and Mary Howitt were major players and serious competi­ tors in the literary marketplace of Reynolds's time. Their poetry was reviewed in the most prestigious journals, respected by discerning readers, reprinted, imitated, anthologized, sung, memorized for recitation, copied into com­ monplace books, and bought by the public. Before their time, prominent writers such as Joanna Baillie, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Hannah More, Mary Robinson, Anna Seward, Charlotte Smith, Mary Tighe, and others helped to change the landscape of British poetry both in style and in subject matter.
    [Show full text]
  • Palestine, and Other Poems
    o 4 ^ < H O ,<y , o « ) 'o, k PALESTINE, AND OTHER POEMS BY THE LATE RIGHT REV. REGINALD HEBER, D. D. LORD BISHOP OF CALCUTTA. NOW FIRST COLLECTED. WITH A MEMOIR OF HIS LIFE. PHILADELPHIA: CAREY, LEA AND CAREY—CHESNUT STREET, . SOLD IN NEW YORK BY G. & C. CARVILL BOSTON BY MUNROE & FRANCIS. 1828. : : xf Eastern District of Pennsylvania, to uit Be it Remembered, that on the nineteenth day of May, in the fifty-second year of the Independence of the United States of America, A. D. 1828, Carey, Lea, and Carey, of the said District, have deposited in this office the title of a book, the right whereof they claim as pro- prietors, in the words following, to wit Palestine, and other Poems. By the late Right Rev. Reginald Heber, D. D. Lord Bishop of Calcutta. Now first collected. With a Memoir of his Life. In conformity to the Act of Congress of the United States, entitled " An Act for the encouragement of learn- ing, by- securing the copies of maps, charts, and books, to the authors and proprietors of such copies, during the times therein mentioned"—and also to the Act, entitled " An Act supplementary to an Act, entitled ' An act for the encouragement of learning, by securing the copies of maps, charts, and books, to the authors and proprietors of such copies during the times therein mentioned,' and extending the benefits thereof to the arts of designing, engraving, and etching historical and other prints." D. CALDWELL, Clerk of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Adam Waldic & Co. Printers.
    [Show full text]
  • As Epistemic Strategy in Hemans's Records Of
    R OMANTICT EXTUALITIES LITERATURE AND PRINT CULTURE, 1780–1840 • ISSN 1748-0116 ◆ ISSUE 23 ◆ SUMMER 2020 ◆ SPECIAL ISSUE : THE MINERVA PRESS AND THE LITERARY MARKETPLACE ◆ www.romtext.org.uk ◆ CARDIFF UNIVERSITY PRESS ◆ 2 romantic textualities 23 Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840, 23 (Summer 2020) Available online at <www.romtext.org.uk/>; archive of record at <https://publications.cardiffuniversitypress.org/index.php/RomText>. Journal DOI: 10.18573/issn.1748-0116 ◆ Issue DOI: 10.18573/romtext.i23 Romantic Textualities is an open access journal, which means that all content is available without charge to the user or his/her institution. You are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission from either the publisher or the author. Unless otherwise noted, the material contained in this journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 (cc by-nc-nd) Interna- tional License. See https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ for more information. Origi- nal copyright remains with the contributing author and a citation should be made when the article is quoted, used or referred to in another work. C b n d Romantic Textualities is an imprint of Cardiff University Press, an innovative open-access publisher of academic research, where ‘open-access’ means free for both readers and writers. Find out more about the press at cardiffuniversitypress.org. Editors: Anthony Mandal,
    [Show full text]
  • The Poet and the Woman: a Study of Felicia Hemans's Letters
    The poet and the woman : a study of Felicia Hemans’s letters Marie-Joshua Huet To cite this version: Marie-Joshua Huet. The poet and the woman : a study of Felicia Hemans’s letters. Humanities and Social Sciences. 2017. dumas-02110525 HAL Id: dumas-02110525 https://dumas.ccsd.cnrs.fr/dumas-02110525 Submitted on 25 Apr 2019 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivatives| 4.0 International License Table of contents. Acknowledgments. ...........................................................................................................4 Introduction.......................................................................................................................5 FELICIA HEMANS AND HER LETTERS......................................................................9 1. Felicia Hemans's biography..................................................................................10 2. Presentation of the three primary sources.............................................................13
    [Show full text]
  • The Poet and the Profits: Felicia Hemans and the Literary Marketplace
    University of South Carolina Scholar Commons Faculty Publications English Language and Literatures, Department of 1997 The oP et and the Profits: Felicia Hemans and the Literary Marketplace Paula R. Feldman University of South Carolina - Columbia, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/engl_facpub Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Publication Info Published in Keats-Shelley Journal, Volume 46, 1997, pages 148-176. Feldman, P.R. (1997). The oeP t and the Profits: eF licia Hemans and the Literary Marketplace. Keats-Shelley Journal, 46, 148-176. © 1997 Keats-Shelley Association of America, Inc. This Article is brought to you by the English Language and Literatures, Department of at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Poet and the Profits: Felicia Hemans and the LiteraryMarketplace PAULA R. FELDMAN HAT did it mean-in financial terms-to be a success- ful Romantic woman poet? What were the economic realities and possibilities of her life? What standard of living could she achieve? Was it possible to maintain a middle-class household on poetry writing alone? What were the most lucrative sources of income from poetry production, and how did financial considerations affect a poet's literary decisions? To what extent might a woman poet participate in negotiating terms with publishers and even in making marketing decisions about her work? How might economic decisions affect her poetic reputation? We are remarkably ignorant about such matters.
    [Show full text]
  • Mrs. Felicia Hemans
    PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN PEOPLE QUOTED IN WALDEN: 1 MRS. FELICIA DOROTHEA HEMANS, NÉE BROWNE (THE BOY STOOD ON THE BURNING DECK ...) “NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY 1.See Caroline Moseley, “HDT and Felicia Dorothea Hemans,” Concord Saunterer 13 (Summer 1978):5-8. HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: MRS. FELICIA DOROTHEA HEMANS PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN WALDEN: On gala days the town fires its great guns, which echo PEOPLE OF like popguns to these woods, and some waifs of martial music WALDEN occasionally penetrate thus far. To me, away there in my bean- field at the other end of the town, the big guns sounded as if a puff ball had burst; and when there was a military turnout of which I was ignorant, I have sometimes had a vague sense all the day of some sort of itching and disease in the horizon, as if some eruption would break out there soon, either scarlatina or canker- rash, until at length some more favorable puff of wind, making haste over the fields and up the Wayland road, brought me information of the “trainers.” It seemed by the distant hum as if somebody’s bees had swarmed, and that the neighbors, according to Virgil’s advice, by a faint tintinnabulum upon the most sonorous of their domestic utensils, were endeavoring to call them down into the hive again. And when the sound died quite away, and the hum had ceased, and the most favorable breezes told no tale, I knew that they had got the last drone of them all safely into the Middlesex hive, and that now their minds were bent on the honey with which it was smeared.
    [Show full text]
  • Ttu Pmbc01 000026.Pdf (13.40Mb)
    -|^ls' 4^' 4*|^s 4'l^. ^ 4^4 e^&^Q^agsses^ssss^Si^^^!^^^' S^^^SSiK^J^.^g^v'?^???^^^ , /, ,'• / J /'S'' ^^^c^-^>^^ ^a^^^-tf/. POEMS BY FELICIA HEMANS, WITH AN ESSAY ON HER GENIUS, BY H T. TUCKERMAN. EDITED BY RUFUS W. GRISWOLD. NEW rOEK: LEAYITT & ALLEN BROS., No. 8 nOV/ARD STREET. INTRODUCTION. FELICIA DOROTHEA BROWNE was born in Liverpool on the twenty-first of September, 1793. Her child­ hood was passed among the wild mountain scenery of Wales; and before she was nineteen years of age, she had a printed collection of verses before the world.^ From this period to the end of her history she sent forth volume after volume, each surpassing its prede­ cessor in tenderness and beauty. At nineteen she Vv-as married to Captain HEMANS, of the Fourth regiment. He was of an irritable tempera­ ment, and his health had been injured by the vicis­ situdes of a military life. They lived together unhap­ pily for several years, when Captain HEMANS left England for Italy and never returned. Mrs. HEMANS continued to reside with her mother and her sister. Miss MAUY ANNE BUOWNE, now Mrs, GRAY, a poetess of some reputation, near St. Asaph, in North Wales, where she devoted her attention to literature and to the education of her children, five sons, in whom all her affections from this time v/ere centered. Here she wiote The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy, Modern Greece, Translations from Camoens, Wallace, (iv) Dartmoor, The Sceptic, Welsh Melodies, Historic Scenes, The Siege of Valencia, The Vespers of Palermo, The Forest Sanctuary, The Songs of the Affections, Records of Women, and the lays of Many Lands.
    [Show full text]
  • HEMANS: the Literary Manuscripts of Felicia Hemans, 1793-1835
    HEMANS: The Literary Manuscripts of Felicia Hemans, 1793-1835 HEMANS: The Literary Manuscripts of Felicia Hemans (1793-1835) Contents listing PUBLISHER'S NOTE CONTENTS OF REELS HEMANS: The Literary Manuscripts of Felicia Hemans, 1793-1835 Publisher's Note “The 19th century celebration of Hemans’s exemplary womanliness may be deafening, but for the critics who have helped to rehabilitate her in the last decade, Hemans represents another ideal: a subtly transgressive feminist, collapsing the gender constructions she appears to endorse and criticizing the social order which imposes such limits on women.” Frances Wilson, writing in the London Review of Books, 16 November 2000 The poetry of Felicia Hemans was read and admired by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Ann Evans, Walter Scott, Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Queen Victoria. She sold more books of poetry during the Romantic era than anyone but Lord Byron and Walter Scott. Though she died in 1835, her work remained central to literary culture throughout the nineteenth century. In fact, she was embraced during the Victorian period as not only one of the great poets but as a paragon of Victorian womanhood. This despite the fact that her marriage broke down after five years and she spent most of her adult life as the breadwinner of a large family, supporting her five boys as well as her mother and sister. Her best known volume – Records of Women – contains imaginative portraits of strong women throughout history and from a variety of cultures, from abandoned brides to martyred heroines. And yet, in the 1990s, the Romanticist Jerome McGann was compelled to ask: Do we remember any of her poems?” How then did her star fall? Felicia Dorothea Browne was born in Liverpool on 25 September 1793 – the product of a cosmopolitan marriage between George Browne, an Irish merchant, and Felicity Dorothea (née Wagner), the daughter of an Italian diplomat.
    [Show full text]
  • Examining Female Epic in the Poetry of Felicia Hemans and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
    “Unscrupulously Epic”: Examining Female Epic in the Poetry of Felicia Hemans and Elizabeth Barrett Browning by Christine W. Robertson A thesis presented to the University of Waterloo in fulfillment of the thesis requirement for the degree of Master of Arts in English Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 2007 © Christine W. Robertson 2007 AUTHOR'S DECLARATION I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. ii Abstract Virginia Woolf once remarked that, “[t]here is no reason to think that the form of the epic ... suit[s] a woman any more than the [masculine] sentence” (Woolf 84). This thesis represents an attempt to explore what the epic genre, as imagined and written by women, might look like in regards to the verse of fellow women poets Felicia Hemans and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Despite the persistent critical misconception that women’s poetry of the Romantic and Victorian periods is comprised mainly of light, lyric verse and tends to lack that “great effort” – for example, the epic poem – which often appears in the work of their male contemporaries, this thesis will argue conversely that Hemans and Barrett Browning do assume certain aspects of traditional epic poetry – a genre “almost coterminous” with masculinity (Schweizer 1) – in their work, while also managing to transform the genre in order that their work might successfully embody a more feminine perspective. The first chapter of the thesis examines the ways in which these two women poets are able to bridge the private and public spheres by transforming the quintessential role of the female poet as record-keeper into that of the poet as prophet and visionary in their political poetry.
    [Show full text]
  • Hemans' Passion
    JASON R. RUDY Hemans' Passion SHE MAY HAVE BEEN, BUT FELICIA HEMANS' VICTORIAN CRIT most most SENTIMENTALics seemed struck, and impressed, by her consistent lack of passion. "She is no sibyl, tossed to and fro in the tempest of furious excite ment," writes George Gilfillan in 1849, "but ever a 'deep, majestical, and high-souled woman'?the calm mistress of the highest and stormiest of her emotions."1 William Michael Rossetti draws attention in 1878 toHemans' " keen sense of restraint, her [a]ptitude and delicacy in versification, and a harmonious balance in the treatment of [her] subject."2 And in his 1848 Fe male Poets ofGreat Britain, Frederic Rowton offersmuch the same: Diction, manner, sentiment, passion, and belief are in her as delicately rounded off'asare the bones and muscles of theMedicean Venus. There is not a harsh or angular line in her whole mental contour. I do not know a violent, spasmodic, or contorted idea in all her writings; but every page is full of grace, harmony, and expressive glowing beauty.3 as Hemans' contemporaries similarly noted the poet's reserve, in Francis Jeffrey's important review of 1829: It is and singularly sweet, elegant, tender?touching, perhaps, and contemplative, rather than vehement and overpowering; and not only finished an even throughout with exquisite delicacy, and severity of execution, but informed with a purity and loftiness of feeling, and a certain sober and humble tone of indulgence and piety, which must satisfy all judgments, and allay the apprehensions of those who are most afraid of the passionate exaggerations of poetry.4 This essay has benefited immeasurably from ongoing exchanges with Emma Mason.
    [Show full text]
  • Verse in New Monthly Magazine
    Curran Index - Table of Contents Listing New Monthly Magazine For a general introduction to and attribution listing of prose for The New Monthly Magazine see the Wellesley Index, Volume III, pages 161-302. The Curran Index includes additions and corrections to that listing, as well as a listing of poetry published between 1821 and 1854. EDITORS: Writing of Francis Foster Barham, both the DNB and the new Oxford DNB incorrectly claim that Barham and John Abraham Heraud edited NMM. In fact, neither man was at any time or in any way connected with NMM. The error apparently can be traced to A Memorial of Francis Barham, ed. Isaac Pitman, published in London in 1873, two years after Barham’s death, and it can be explained by a study of capitalization: what Barham and Heraud edited was a new series of the Monthly Magazine, not the New Monthly (the DNB has it right in its biography of Heraud). The third and final series of the Monthly, with a minimal change in its sub-title, started in 1839, with Barham and Heraud as its editors; Barham stayed only a year as editor, Heraud three years. See Kenneth Curry, ‘The Monthly Magazine,’ in British Literary Magazines. The Romantic Age, 1789-1836, ed. Alvin Sullivan, 314-319. In applications for RLF aid (case 1167), Heraud repeatedly claimed editorship of and frequent contributions to the Monthly but never mentioned the New Monthly. [This note clarifies and supersedes that in VPR 28 (1995), 291.] [12/07] Editorship. Wellesley 3:169 gives dates of Cyrus Redding’s sub-editorship as February 1821 - September 1830; those of S.
    [Show full text]
  • LEL Forging Corinne
    臺大文史哲學報 第七十七期 2012年11月 頁289~328 臺灣大學文學院 “Why did she love her mother’s so?”: L.E.L. Forging Corinne Wu, Ya-feng Abstract The early decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a renewed interest in the folklore of the mermaid. This period of intensified nation-building and pursuit of individual spirit gradually shifted the political concerns of the medieval romance, such as in the French legend of Mélusine, to the struggle of Romantic author, such as in Corinne, or Italy (1807) by Germaine de Staël. Corinne, an improvisatrice of hybrid origin becomes a model for women writers in the nineteenth century. Their responses can be summed up in the polarized paradigm of the poetess represented by Felicia Dorothea Hemans, “the pious mother,” and Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the pretty verse maker. Landon’s self-definition as a poetess against the model of Corinne develops in three phases in which she adjusts her alignment with her foremothers and finally finds a way out of the impasse bequeathed by them, namely the overwhelming emphasis on the body. First, in “The Improvisatrice,” Landon exploits Corinne’s performative art to exude the visual confines demanded by the popular periodicals and gift annuals. Second, in “The Fairy of the Fountains,” she adapts the matrilineal legend of Mélusine by crafting the word rather than the body of the Fairy into the crux of transgression. Third, in “Corinne at the Cape of Misena,” Landon uses her translation of Corinne’s last song to reinstate her virtuosity. This paper seeks to delineate the ways in which Landon forges her own authority as a new Corinne by capitalizing on the “mingled dower” of Mélusine.
    [Show full text]