SUSAN BROWNexercised moral authority in the domestic realm. In the minds of both
critics and writers, poetry became rapidly feminized in a way that intensi-
fied the association between the poetess and altruism, domesticity, senti-
mentality, and indeed spirituality - qualities that were placed in opposition
to harder, rougher, and more taxing demands of the masculine public
sphere.
For poets such as Hemans the ideological associations accruing to poetry
were largely welcome: in many respects she embraced her role as a British
poetess. 17 Hemans located herself explicitly not only in the high poetic
tradition of Sappho but also in relation to the idea of a transnational and
transhistorical womanhood. Both Records of Woman (1828) and Songs of
the Affections (1830) feature predominantly the situations of women from
numerous cultures and historical periods. Notwithstanding separation
from her husband and her avoidance of more mundane household manage-
ment, Hemans managed to represent herself as a poet of the feminine
domestic ideal. Critics quickly associated Hemans with Wordsworth, the
male poet of domesticity and Byron's foil. In contrast to the London-based
L.E.L., Hemans lived for most of her adult life in rural Wales. Further, her
dedication to her mother and her children seemed to prove a more effective
alibi in the absence of a husband than L.E.L.'s financial support of her
mother and brothers while living separately from them in the metropolis.
The domestic ideology that Hemans's poetry often celebrates is as deeply
invested in nationalism and imperialism as it is in gender. Grasping the
appeal of a work such as her popular "Homes of England" requires holding
onto the complementary senses of "domestic" as opposed to both the
"public" and the "foreign." The poem, which opens with a rousing patriotic
epigraph from Walter Scott's Marmion (1808) ("Where's the coward that
would not dare / To fight for such a land?"), 18 moves systematically
through the social ranks. It shifts from the deer, swans, and "tall ancestral
trees" that connote the aristocracy of the "stately Homes of England" down
to the "Cottage Homes of England," binding them conceptually into a
single space within which "first the child's glad spirit loves / Its country and
its God!" (FHV, 228-29). Hemans superimposes the roles of mother and
poet in this lofty nationalist enterprise, which prospers where "woman's
voice flows forth in song" (V, 228).
The treatment of women was assumed to be an index of the degree of
civilization reached by a culture. Victorian poetesses, by such logic, were
yoked to the nationalist project in the titles of two landmark anthologies,
Alexander Dyce's Specimens of British Poetesses (1825) and Frederick
Rowton's Female Poets of Great Britain (1848); Victorian anthologies,
criticism, and biographies all assume that women poets reflect the elevated
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