The Poetics of the “Charmed Cup” in Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Abstract Rather than dutifully producing conventional elegies bemoaning the loss of the exemplary woman poet immediately after Felicia Hemans’s death in 1835, Letitia Elizabeth Landon daringly objects to the disjunction between Hemans’s life and her public image. Landon dissents from regarding Hemans’s poetry as unblemished in its depiction of women’s traditional domestic role and instead hints at the subversive, indirect discontent she detects in Hemans’s verse — long before twentieth-century critics. Women writers must surely have enjoyed witnessing their gender’s growing success in the literary market, but, since women were competing against one another directly in the public sphere, it was inevitable that some regarded each other as competitors and experienced envy of others’ achievements. After her sister’s death, Harriet Hughes might record that Hemans “would rejoice in [the gifted writers of her own sex’s] success with true sisterly disinterestedness,” but Landon does not appear to have adopted such a “generous” stance (121).

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Gender, Emotion and Transcendence In John Keats' “Ode On Melanchholy" and Felicia Dorothea Hemans' "Ode to Cheerfulness"

10.32920/ryerson.14662248.v1 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Dana Mitchell

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Women Writers ◽

John Keats ◽

Literary Tradition ◽

Women Poets ◽

Emotional Experiences ◽

Felicia Hemans ◽

Romantic Literature ◽

Feminine Identity ◽

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Introduction Melancholy has been tied to the Romantic literary tradition and its preoccupation with intensely emotional experiences, as well as the poetic forms that best accommodate them. Odes, elegies and laments are remarkably prominent in the Romantic canon and have come to epitomize the nineteenth century as a time “steeped in melancholy” (Bowring 38). While Romanticism is largely remembered as an age of melancholy, there were many women poets who were unable to fully access these expressions of sorrow, therefore relying on more joyful emotions that are not as closely associated with the period. Poets such as Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon wrote on topics of mild sentiment and the domestic, working within structures of feminine identity that were both acceptable and commercial. Although these writers often fought against such conventions in their work, the masculine gendering of melancholy and its connection to poetic genius and transcendence ultimately reduces the ability of women writers to achieve an eternal reputation in the canon of Romantic literature.

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Enlarging the Heart: L. E. L.'s “The Improvisatrice,” Hemans's “Properzia Rossi,” and Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh

Victorian Literature and Culture ◽

10.1017/s1060150300002242 ◽

1998 ◽

Vol 26 (1) ◽

pp. 1-17 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Margot K. Louis

Keyword(s):

Older Woman ◽

Felicia Hemans ◽

Separate Spheres ◽

Letitia Elizabeth Landon ◽

Religious Vision ◽

Essential Value ◽

Aurora Leigh ◽

The Relationship

Elizabeth barrett browning's relation to her female predecessors was complex, conflicted, and rewarding. In Aurora Leigh we see both the heroine and her creator grow from poets who attempt to prove themselves in traditionally masculine terms, into poets who engage with a feminine tradition of sentimental verse which they resist and criticize but nevertheless find of essential value. Only by viewing the poem against the backdrop of the sentimental tradition can we fully appreciate Barrett Browning's challenge to the cult of privacy and the doctrine of separate spheres, her dual emphasis on poetry as at once a job requiring doggedness and a vocation requiring wide social and religious vision, and, finally, her sense of the connection between herself and her female predecessors. Such poets as Felicia Hemans and L. E. L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon) stand in a relation to Barrett Browning which resembles the unsentimental aunt's relation to Aurora in Book 1 of Aurora Leigh: there is more conflict than sympathy in the relationship; the older woman represents a version of femininity which the younger must at all costs resist; and yet the older woman leaves the younger a legacy which is both narrow and enabling, an essential basis for the young poet's future achievement.

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Gender, Emotion and Transcendence In John Keats' “Ode On Melanchholy" and Felicia Dorothea Hemans' "Ode to Cheerfulness"

10.32920/ryerson.14662248 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Dana Mitchell

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Women Writers ◽

John Keats ◽

Literary Tradition ◽

Women Poets ◽

Emotional Experiences ◽

Felicia Hemans ◽

Romantic Literature ◽

Feminine Identity ◽

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Introduction Melancholy has been tied to the Romantic literary tradition and its preoccupation with intensely emotional experiences, as well as the poetic forms that best accommodate them. Odes, elegies and laments are remarkably prominent in the Romantic canon and have come to epitomize the nineteenth century as a time “steeped in melancholy” (Bowring 38). While Romanticism is largely remembered as an age of melancholy, there were many women poets who were unable to fully access these expressions of sorrow, therefore relying on more joyful emotions that are not as closely associated with the period. Poets such as Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon wrote on topics of mild sentiment and the domestic, working within structures of feminine identity that were both acceptable and commercial. Although these writers often fought against such conventions in their work, the masculine gendering of melancholy and its connection to poetic genius and transcendence ultimately reduces the ability of women writers to achieve an eternal reputation in the canon of Romantic literature.

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