ABSTRACT
Felicia Hemans was the leading female voice of European Romantic liberalism within the English-speaking world of her time. She acquired this voice partly by relentlessly adapting European liberal Romantic literature into forms appropriate for the British cultural and political situation, though she did little actual translating. Hemans’s career as exemplary European liberal voice had five related phases, and one blind alley, each built on the preceding one, and each responding to the changing public political scene in Britain, Europe, and beyond. Tales and Historic Scenes (1819) collects a variety of narrative and reflective poems set in various times and places from antiquity to the early modern era. Hemans’s career comprises, then, a continuing spectacle of a liberal Romantic feminist rewriting contemporary literature and past history in relation to unfolding current events.
