Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century. Eds. Nanora Sweet and Julie Melnyk. New York: Palgrave, 2001. ISBN 0-333-80109-1. Price: $65.00. Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials. Ed. Susan J. Wolfson. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-691-05029-5. Price: $55.00.

We are lucky to have such an excellent collection of critical essays as the first devoted exclusively to Felicia Hemans, as well as this stunning new edition of her poems, and I can perform no better tribute to its editors and publishers here than by summarizing and engaging with the wide-ranging essays and selections that they contain. In Sweet and Melnyk’s Felicia Hemans, Michael Williamson’s essay “Impure Affections” deals with the difference gender makes in the genre of elegy. Hemans’s mourning poetry shows that, instead of being able to immediately transfer dead flesh into symbolic form, as men can, women have to repent for their desire to live despite the loss of a loved one. Consequently, in Hemans’s oeuvre, “the living [woman survivor,] not the dead, are the subjects of the elegy” (20). Grant Scott takes up another important generic issue in “The Fragile Image: Felicia Hemans and Romantic Ekphrasis,” arguing that Hemans’s “Properzia Rossi” (1828) – a poem about the real, early sixteenth-century woman sculptor from Bologna, Properzia de’Rossi – reverses the female gendering of silent urns by making Rossi’s frozen Ariadne speak, also detailing “the emotional reception of the art work in real rather than ‘slow time’” (42). For Hemans, in this poem, marble is not monumental but organic and even erotic – “mortal,” “sensuous and impermanent” like its creator (49). Thus for Scott, Hemans transforms ekphrasis, or “the process of making verbal art from visual art” (36): “In a rare departure from ekphrastic protocol, ‘Properzia Rossi’ emphasizes the emotional and psychological process of aesthetic creation over the finished product” (45). In addition to genre and specific literary traditions, some of the essays in this collection focus on the materiality of artistic production. Barbara Taylor discusses Hemans’s participation in literary contests as a means for gaining the notoriety that would allow her to make a living comparable to that earned by male writers of the period. Chad Edgar returns to the important issue of the impact upon publishing in annuals on poetic form and content. Departing from considerations of form, determined materially or otherwise, two essays explore Hemans’s gendered construction of poetic voice. John Anderson reads Hemans’s The Forest Sanctuary as an interrogation of the relations among voice, gender, and power. Julie Melnyk reads Hemans’s later religious poetry not as “deathbed panic,” as it is usually pegged (76), but rather as an overturning of her earlier “affectional” mode in order “to restore to women’s poetry a vatic power” (74). The hermeneutic efficacy of Melnyk’s reading is supported most dramatically – her argument is cinched – when she quotes a passage from Hemans’s sonnet sequence, “Female Characters of Scripture,” a sonnet about Mary Magdalene, in which Mary “has the final word in the sonnets: . . . ‘Christ is arisen!’” (90). Hemans is of course accurately relaying the Biblical story as to who first found out Christ had risen (Matt 28.1-11; Mk.16.1-11; Luke 24.1-12), but unlike that story, in Hemans’s sonnet, Mary speaks Christianity’s most salutary words: here Mary Magdalene is simultaneously given voice and recognized as most prophetic of all Christ’s disciples. Melnyk offers us a narrative of poetic development, as does Isobel Armstrong’s elegant essay “Natural and National Monuments” which compares P.B. Shelley’s “Ozymandias” to Hemans’s “The Image in Lava.” Though it claims to be only “a note,” this essay offers a full comparison, bringing up in the process Armstrong’s signal concern: the way in which the social, political, and aesthetic are intertwined. Armstrong outdoes herself in this essay, arguing convincingly for the Lava poem’s complexity: “in the course of grappling with its own problems …