Adapting the Saints: Romantic Hagiography in Felicia Hemans's Records of Woman

Abstract

Throughout Records of Woman: With Other Poems (1828), Felicia Hemans repurposes biographies of female saints, prosopographies of exemplary women, and sacred art to interrogate women's domestic roles across cultures. By merging secular and religious emotions, Hemans constructs a distinctly Romantic brand of hagiography that venerates exemplary women who embrace suffering and death for a noble cause. Hemans's critics imposed a more traditional model of hagiography onto her biography after her death, thereby shaping the Romantic poet's posthumous reputation into that of a saintly Victorian poetess.