Hemans, Felicia Dorothea

▪ English poet

née  Felicia Dorothea Browne 

born Sept. 25, 1793, Liverpool

died May 16, 1835, Dublin

 English poet who owed the immense popularity of her poems to a talent for treating Romantic themes—nature, the picturesque, childhood innocence, travels abroad, liberty, the heroic—with an easy and engaging fluency. Poems (1808), written when she was between 8 and 13, was the first of a series of 24 volumes of verse; from 1816 to 1834 one or more appeared almost every year.

      At 19 she married Capt. Alfred Hemans, but they separated seven years later; her prolific output helped to support her five children. She became a literary celebrity, admired by such famous older writers as William Wordsworth and Sir Walter Scott. Often diffuse and sentimental, she has been chiefly remembered for her shorter pieces, notably “The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers,” “Dirge,” “Casabianca” (“The boy stood on the burning deck”), and "The Homes of England" (“The stately homes of England”), but was perhaps at her best in her sequence of poems on female experience, Records of Women (1828).

Additional Reading

Peter W. Trinder, Mrs. Hemans (1984); Norma Clarke, Ambitious Heights (1990).

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