author
Mrs. Hemans
1793–1835
A hugely popular Romantic-era poet in her own lifetime, she wrote with warmth and feeling about home, loss, patriotism, and heroic sacrifice. Her best-known lines became part of everyday literary memory, but her work reaches far beyond a few famous quotations.
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About the author
Born in Liverpool on September 25, 1793, Felicia Dorothea Hemans was raised largely in Wales after her family left England during her childhood. She published poems while still very young and grew into one of the most widely read poets of the early 19th century, admired in Britain and the United States for her graceful, accessible style.
Writing as Mrs. Hemans, she became especially known for poems that joined Romantic feeling with scenes of domestic life, history, and national memory. Readers long remembered pieces such as Casabianca and the line "The stately homes of England," and during her lifetime her popularity was often said to rank just behind Byron's.
Hemans died near Dublin on May 16, 1835. Although her reputation changed over time, she remains an important voice in Romantic poetry, especially for the way she brought emotional depth, moral seriousness, and a distinctive female perspective to subjects that many of her contemporaries treated very differently.