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The Poet and the Woman: a Study of Felicia Hemans's Letters

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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 i. Henry Chorley's Memorials of Mrs. Hemans: With Illustrations of Her Literary Character, from Her Private Correspondence and Harriet Hughes's The Work of Mrs. Hemans, With a Memoir of Her Life by Her Sister.......................................13 ii. Susan Wolfson's Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials. ................................................................................................................................18 3. Presentation of the letters......................................................................................21 i. Dates of her letters..............................................................................................21 ii. Location of her letters........................................................................................24 iii. Her correspondents...........................................................................................27 FELICIA HEMANS AND THE EPISTOLARY FORM.................................................38 1. The ambiguity of the epistolary form...................................................................39 2. Felicia Hemans's stance on the form. ...................................................................44 3. Her epistolary style...............................................................................................52 i. Opening and exordium........................................................................................52 ii. Body of the letter. ..............................................................................................55 iii. Signature. ........................................................................................................58 4. The purpose of her letters......................................................................................62 i. Regular communication......................................................................................64 ii. Literary and artistic criticism.............................................................................66 iii. Business matters. ............................................................................................74 iv. A place to confide..............................................................................................76 FELICIA HEMANS AND HER IDENTITY..................................................................81 1. The theme of nature in her letters.........................................................................82 i. The Beautiful.......................................................................................................83 ii. The Picturesque..................................................................................................89 iii. The Sublime......................................................................................................93 2 2. Her role as a woman and a poet............................................................................99 i. Awareness of her role as a woman......................................................................99 ii. Awareness of her role as a poetess...................................................................105 iii. Felicia Hemans's relationship with fame........................................................109 iv. Negotiating her identity as a woman and as a poet.........................................115 Conclusion. ...................................................................................................................125 Appendices....................................................................................................................128 Appendix 1. Corpus of Felicia Hemans's letters used in the analysis p.10..............128 Appendix 2.1. Harriet Hughes's The Works of Mrs. Hemans, With a Memoir of....139 Her Life by Her Sister, pp. 240-241. ........................................................................139 Appendix 2.2. Henry Chorley's Memorials of Mrs. Hemans: [...], Volume 2., pp. 219- 221.............................................................................................................................140 Appendix 3. Extract from a letter sent by Felicia Hemans to a female correspondent, date and place unknown. ..........................................................................................141 Appendix 4. Letter sent to a female correspondent, date and place unknown..........142 Appendix 5. Cupid revives the fainted Psyche, Bertel Thorvaldsen. ......................142 Bibliography..................................................................................................................143 3 Acknowledgments. Writing this paper was a challenging but ultimately gratifying experience which could not have been completed without the help of many people. Firstly, I would like to thank Mr. Alain Kerhervé, my research supervisor, for his advice to focus on the letters of Felicia Hemans. Moreover, his expertise and guidance were precious resources on which I could rely, and throughout the year, his motivation and interest for my work were strong encouragements in my writing. Secondly, I am much indebted to my diverse teachers, however, I would like to thank in particular Tom Mole from the University of Edinburgh who introduced me to Felicia Hemans's work, along with Mrs Annick Cossic and Mrs Camille Manfredi for their teaching which helped me shape this present document. I would like to thank my fellow students, their advice and their generosity was very helpful, in particular, thank you to Noémie Tosser, Léa Marzin, Claire Puget, Megan Guyonvarch and Marie Eustace who have been a constant support in moments of hardship. I am grateful for the motivation and companionship shared during this year and I hope that I was able to reciprocate the help that they brought me. I could not end these acknowledgments without thanking my family for their unconditional support in my studies, not only during this year, but also the one yet to come. 4 Introduction. “Her even lines her steady temper shows; Neat as her dress, and polish'd as her brow.” Anna Barbauld, “On a Lady's Writing,” (1773). 1 “I came home, to be sure, in rather a disastrous state after my adventure, and was greeted by my maid, with that most disconsolate visage of hers, which invariably moves my hard heart to laughter; for I had got wet above my ancles in the haunted burn, torn my gown in making my way through thickets of wild roses, stained my gloves with wood strawberries, and even- direst misfortune of all ! scratched my face with a rowan branch.” Felicia Hemans in a letter from July the 13th 1829.2 I first encountered Felicia Hemans in a classroom at the University of Edinburgh where her recent academic "recovery," as well as that of other Romantic women poets, was being discussed. It was said that women were responsible for around half of the published poetry of the period 1780 – 1830 however, I could not remember having ever studied a Romantic woman writer. Furthermore, Felicia Hemans was one of the best- selling and most popular poets of the century, read in Britain and America alike, and one of the first women writers to make a living out of her profession. Therefore, I was puzzled by my own ignorance but also by the general lack of interest for Felicia Hemans or other female authors of her time. The more I read about Felicia Hemans, the more she appeared contradictory: applauded by many of her contemporaries she was simultaneously disregarded as merely the expression of an outdated imperialism sentimentality a few decades after her death, with women writers seeking to disassociate themselves from her. It appeared that her fame became her downfall and she was regarded not as a talented writer but a popular one suffering from her celebrity which fueled critics both of the twentieth century and modern ones, calling her talent “facile.” 3 Thus, my decision to study Felicia Hemans has come from a desire to
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