ABSTRACT
Writings published in literary annuals and gift-books, such as The Literary Souvenir, Heath’s Book of Beauty, Amulet, Bijou, Friendship’s Offering or The Keepsake, have been long neglected since those texts were generally regarded as essentially second-rate literature; nevertheless, the fact that those literary annuals and gift-books were considered souvenirs intended for a middle-class female reading public says much about the kind of woman portrayed in those stories: women conceived as madonne, iconic role models of behaviour and good conduct. Those annuals became a feminine object whose elegant aura was further emphasized by means of embellishments – that is, illustrations accompanying the poetic texts. These illustrations heavily supported a female identity based on a conservative moral destined to forge the idea of women as angel-like entities. Throughout this chapter, I will analyse some poetic examples written by Felicia Hemans, together with the different accompanying plates, and how this fantasy image is firmly grounded on the eighteenth-century aesthetics of the beautiful, as categorized by Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), where he contributed to modelling the ideal woman as connected with weakness, smoothness and delicacy.
