By her death in 1834, Hemans (b. 1793) was a literary celebrity with a mass market readership and Britain’s “most noted woman poet”. Like many Romantic women poets, however, her reputation suffered with the advent of modernism and it has taken decades of sustained critical engagement, beginning with feminist recuperations in the 1970s, for her rehabilitation. She is now recognised by many “as the most notable British poet flourishing between the death of Byron and the rise of Tennyson and the Brownings” (ODNB). Liverpool-born and Welsh by adoption, Hemans was a polyglot with pan-European interests and, though Byron was, privately, not a fan, she was a well-respected and well-networked member of the Romantic literati, counting William Wordsworth, Walter Scott, the Marys Howitt and Mitford, and the poet Maria Jane Jewsbury as friends. Hemans published 20 volumes and nearly 400 poems, as well as one play and prose pieces in the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine; her 1828 Records of Woman, about legendary and historic women, proved her most successful book, though she repeatedly returned to the subject of war in her poetry. The University of Liverpool awards the annual Felicia Hemans prize for lyrical poetry.
Louisa’s dedicatee is not Marianne Egerton, Lady Marian Alford (1817-1888), who, in 1839, was unmarried and still Compton by surname; sadly, the Boxing Day gift giver and her friend remain unidentified.