England as Centrifuge: Felicia Hemans and the Threshold Foreclosed

Abstract

In the summer of 1823, the British Critic declared that when a woman can write as Felicia Hemans could, “she ought to write. Her mind is national property.”¹ Indeed, in the heyday of Hemans’s commercial and critical success, she seemed to speak for all of England. What Stuart Curran has called her “laureate manqué” status surely derived from her ability to express a potent “fusion of domestic and military values” that both fueled and reflected England’s post-Waterloo triumphalism.² Although she regretted at the time of her death that she had not crafted the one “noble and complete work […] which might permanently take its place as the work of an English poetess,” the Victorian afterlife of her poetry suggests that her oeuvre, taken as a whole, certainly achieved this aim. ³ Her enormously popular “feminine poetic national sentimentality” continued to be vital posthumously, both in the British Isles and at the farthest reaches of empire, where “Victorian culture tells soldiers that they fight for home, and it often does so in the voice of Felicia Hemans.”⁴