Posthumous Fame and Local Celebrity: The Campaign to Erect the Hemans Memorial

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay traces the late-Victorian campaign to erect a monument to Felicia Hemans in Liverpool, the city of her birth. The campaign was conducted through reports and correspondence in the liberal newspaper, the Liverpool Mercury, which itself supported the campaign. Drawing on recent critical work relating to the recovery of women’s writing, nineteenth-century understandings of celebrity and fame, and the high-Romantic idea that true literary success is posthumous, the essay analyses the representation of Hemans and her work in this public correspondence, and its engagement with Hemans’s international fame and literary achievements. The essay argues that concepts of celebrity (as opposed to literary fame) were used to devalue the work of women poets, particularly those who benefitted from contemporary innovations in print culture, and the exponential expansion of print markets in the Victorian era, and that the treatment of Hemans in this campaign offers insights into the erasure of women from the twentieth-century canon.