Felicia Hemans and the Social Coalition in Liverpool

Felicia Hemans and the Social Coalition in Liverpool by Serena Baiesi Abstract Critics of her time considered Felicia Hemans a prototype of the female poet who wrote elegant and tender verses on women’s feelings and domestic affection. However, even though women were excluded from directly participating in the political sphere, they often challenged and discussed this gendered discourse, primarily in the literary domain. They felt particularly invested in a rapidly-changing reality in which they were, on the one hand, passive observers of an unstable historical panorama, and, on the other, responsible and engaged intellectuals who developed explanatory, though not apologetic, theories for such turbulent times. Felicia Hemans enthusiastically responded to the unfolding national and international political events of her time and was inspired by their dream of founding a modern state in the aftermath of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era. She wrote for a steadily growing, middle-class reading public that was very active in the political arena. Lead by Roscoe, this group animated Liverpool’s intellectual and social life with their interest in state affairs, and was among those who made Hemans a popular poet, which she remained until the early twentieth century. Hemans inherited Liverpool society’s liberal ideas without becoming an explicitly radical writer and conveyed ideas of social, political and cultural reformation, particularly in her early publications. Hemans’s involvement in the liberal coalition of Liverpool demonstrates how women writers were deeply entangled in the period’s social and political turmoil, and how they became increasingly engaged with key political and economic issues such as slavery and abolition.