by Mary Chadwick
One of the most popular poets of the nineteenth century but largely forgotten in the twentieth, Felicia Hemans has been rediscovered by critics, if not the public, in the last few decades. Her representations of a restricted feminine sphere have provoked debate amongst feminists while her national poetry - English, British, Welsh and beyond - provides a site of ambiguity for scholars determined to solve the conundrums she poses.
Hemans spent the majority of her life in Wales. She began her poetic career in the wake of eighteenth-century Celticism (or Celtomania) and at the height of the Romantic rediscovery of Wales by those whose plans for European travel were thwarted by war. A voracious reader, she published her first volume of poetry at the age of fourteen.
Focusing upon her juvenilia, this paper explores the relationship between Hemans’s work and her location in North Wales. I begin by examining the uses to which Hemans puts a number of the themes of eighteenth-century Anglophone Welsh poetry including the glorious past and subsequent decline of Welsh history and culture, the figure of genius, and fairy lore. My focus is the extent to which Hemans’s appropriation of these themes indicates the incorporation of Wales, her culture and her people into the relatively new state of Great Britain.
Biography
Mary Chadwick is in the final year of an AHRC-funded PhD at Aberystwyth University. She researches expressions of Welsh identity among the North Walian gentry of the late eighteenth century.
