Abstract
From the perspective of her career-narrative, 1823 was an important year for Felicia Hemans. To all appearances she was permanently stabled at the House of Murray as one of the great publisher’s eminent writers; she wielded the kind of clout that convinced the Covent Garden management that putting on one of her plays would be lucrative;1 and Thomas Campbell, the editor of the New Monthly Magazine, recognized the value of her lyrics which had become, according to Henry Chorley, invaluable to the ‘lighter periodicals of the day’.2 Hemans exploited her clout by publishing the kind of poem that she had been wanting to compose and had not been seen before: a serious, protracted poem that takes as its subject the psychological landscape of womanhood, The Forest Sanctuary. Unfortunately for Hemans, the experiment was not commercially successful. Hemans was thrown back upon the kind of writing that was commercially viable: the short lyric.
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Notes and References
Because of the steep production costs of plays, the managing-hoards of theaters were averse to risks of any kind. A successful production was extrapolated not only from the internal merits of the play — its plot, language, and so on — but also from the name of the dramatist whose work was sure to draw a crowd. Sometimes even a name was no guarantee of a play’s production as the difficulties encountered by both Joanna Baillie and S. T. Coleridge certainly suggest. Clearly, the managing-boards had the difficult job of assessing which playwrights were all courant enough to draw the crowds over an extended period of time in order to guarantee profits.
See Henry Chorley’s Memorials of Mrs. Helmuts with Illustrations of Her Literary Character front Her Private Correspondence (London: Saunders and Otley, 1836), vol. 1, p. 92.
See Norma Clarke, Ambitious Heights: Writing, Friendship, Love-The Jewsbury Sisters, Felicia Hanaus, and lane Welsh Carlyle (London: Routledge, 1990), especially p. 73.
See Jerome Christensen’s discussion of the link between repeated forays into the public of the literary field and popularity in the career of Lord Byron in his now famous study, Lord Byron’s Strength (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), especially chapter 4, entitled ‘Perversion, Parody and Cultural Hegemony’.
See Chorley’s description of Hemans’s formula for the shorter lyrics that she composed for the ‘lighter periodicals’ in his Memorials, vol. 1, pp. 92–4.
All references to Hemans’s Records of Woman are from the fourth edition-Records of Woman: With Other Poems, 4th ed. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1834).
Chorley, vol. 2, p. 115.
Lor an elaboration of the argument that it is a female-specific attitude towards composition that explains the web of intertextuality between women writers during this era, see Marlon Ross’s Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 300–3.
Edinburgh Review 50 (1829), pp. 32–47.
See Contours of Masculine Desire, pp. 241–3.
Edinburgh Review 50 (1829), p. 47.
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© 2001 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Edgar, C. (2001). Felicia Hemans and the Shifting Field of Romanticism. In: Sweet, N., Melnyk, J. (eds) Felicia Hemans. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230389564_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230389564_8
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