Felicia Hemans was the most widely read woman poet in the nineteenth-century English-speaking world. Broadview’s edition shows why she was one of the few standard poets to be found in middle-class homes on both sides of the Atlantic, despite being routinely disparaged as a “merely” feminine poet. Included here is poetry representative of her entire career, from often-anthologized works, such as “The Homes of England” and “Casabianca,” to several long poems in their entirety, such as “The Forest Sanctuary.” Also included are selections of her prose and letters, a comprehensive introduction, and selections of views and reviews showing her changing and controversial place in culture into the twentieth century. All selections are edited, annotated, and introduced.

Beginning with the premise that men and women of the Romantic period were lively interlocutors who participated in many of the same literary traditions and experiments, Fellow Romantics offers an inspired counterpoint to studies of Romantic-era women writers that stress their differences from their male contemporaries. As they advance the work of scholars who have questioned binary approaches to studying male and female writers, the contributors variously link, among others, Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth, Mary Robinson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Felicia Hemans and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jane Austen and the male Romantic poets. These pairings invite us to see anew the work of both male and female writers by drawing our attention to frequently neglected aspects of each writer's art. Here we see writers of both sexes interacting in their shared historical moment, while the contributors reorient our attention toward common points of engagement between male and female authors. What is gained is a more textured understanding of the period that will serve as a model for future studies.

Vols. for 1898-1968 include a directory of publishers.