A short life of the author
Felicia Dorothea Hemans (25 September 1793 – 16 May 1835) was an English poet who was, during her lifetime, the most popular and commercially successful poet in the English-speaking world — more widely read than Keats, Shelley, or Byron, and rivalled only by Sir Walter Scott. Her poem “Casabianca” (“The boy stood on the burning deck”) became one of the most memorised poems in the English language. Her collection Records of Woman (1828) is one of the most sustained and sophisticated explorations of women’s experience in Romantic-era poetry. After a century of near-total critical dismissal, her reputation has undergone a dramatic scholarly revival.
Life
Hemans was born Felicia Browne in Liverpool, the fifth of seven children. The family moved to Wales when she was seven, and the Welsh landscape — its mountains, ruins, and Celtic history — became a formative influence on her poetry. She was educated at home, learned several languages (including German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin), and published her first volume of poems at fourteen.
In 1812 she married Captain Alfred Hemans, an army officer. They had five sons in six years; in 1818, Captain Hemans left for Italy and never returned. Felicia was effectively abandoned — left to raise five children alone, supporting the household through her poetry. She never spoke publicly about the separation, but its shadow falls across much of her work, which returns again and again to themes of abandonment, domestic sacrifice, and the cost of devotion.
She was prodigiously productive — publishing over twenty volumes in a career that lasted barely two decades. She died of a fever in Dublin at the age of forty-one.
”Casabianca” (1826)
“The boy stood on the burning deck / Whence all but he had fled” — the poem tells the story of a boy who remains at his post on the French flagship L’Orient during the Battle of the Nile, refusing to leave without orders from his father (who is already dead below decks). The ship explodes.
The poem was memorised by generations of British and American schoolchildren and became, through parody and familiarity, one of the most parodied poems in the language. Its critical fate mirrors Hemans’s own: dismissed for decades as sentimental Victorian parlour verse, it has been re-read by modern critics as a poem about the fatal consequences of obedience, duty, and patriarchal authority — a reading that gives it considerably more complexity than the schoolroom tradition suggests.
Records of Woman (1828)
Hemans’s most important collection presents a series of portraits of women from history, mythology, and literature — each exploring the ways in which women’s devotion, talent, and sacrifice have been used, betrayed, or destroyed by the systems they serve. “Properzia Rossi” follows the Renaissance sculptor dying of unrequited love. “The Bride of the Greek Isle” presents a woman whose wedding is interrupted by pirates, who chooses death over captivity. “Indian Woman’s Death Song” gives voice to a Native American woman singing her death chant.
The collection’s coherence is its most remarkable feature: poem after poem, different women in different centuries and cultures endure the same pattern of devotion rewarded by abandonment, talent punished by neglect, love answered by violence. The cumulative effect is devastating — and clearly reflects Hemans’s own experience of abandonment.
Other Work
The Siege of Valencia (1823) is a dramatic poem about a Spanish city besieged by the Moors, in which a mother must choose between her sons’ lives and the city’s honour. The Forest Sanctuary (1825) follows a Spanish Protestant fleeing the Inquisition to the New World. Hymns on the Works of Nature (1833) is a late collection of religious nature poetry.
Critical Standing
Hemans’s fall from critical favour was swift and complete. The Victorian and modernist canons had no place for a woman poet of enormous popularity who wrote about domestic feeling, national sentiment, and religious devotion. She was dismissed as sentimental, conventional, and minor.
The feminist recovery, beginning in the 1990s, has been substantial. Scholars including Susan Wolfson, Nanora Sweet, and Julie Melnyk have demonstrated that Hemans’s apparent conventionality conceals a sophisticated critique of the domestic ideology she seems to celebrate — that her poems about devoted wives and sacrificing mothers systematically reveal the cost of that devotion.
Collecting Hemans
Records of Woman (1828, William Blackwood) in first edition brings $200–$600. Early collected editions of her Poetical Works are $50–$200. Individual volumes from her productive career are modestly priced ($30–$100). Hemans’s popularity in her lifetime means that her books are not rare, but fine copies with original boards are becoming scarce.