Felicia Hemans

Felicia Hemans was among the most widely read poets in English in the nineteenth century, and is now known almost entirely for a single first line that survives as a joke. She published her first collection at fourteen, married an army officer who left for Italy six years and five sons later and never returned, and supported the family and her mother by writing. That is the central fact about her: she was a professional poet with dependants at a time when the men she is compared with had annuities. She published nineteen volumes, was printed in enormous numbers on both sides of the Atlantic, and was admired by Wordsworth and Byron, though both were condescending about it. Casabianca, published in 1826, describes a boy standing on the burning deck of a French ship at the Battle of the Nile in 1798, refusing to leave his post because his father, who is dead below, has not released him; the ship blows up. The boy was real, the son of the captain of L'Orient, and the poem became a fixture of school recitation for a century, which is exactly how it turned into a punchline. Her subject is usually the domestic affections wrecked by public events - war, exile, empire - which is why she was read as safely feminine then and has been reread since as something considerably less comfortable. She died at forty-one in Dublin. The Homes of England, another of her poems, gave the phrase stately homes of England to the language, later borrowed by Noel Coward for a song mocking it. Her work appeared constantly in American schoolbooks and gift annuals and outsold most of her male contemporaries. Recovering her as anything other than a byword for sentimentality took until the 1990s.

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