Brenda R. Weber: Women and Literary Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century: The Transatlantic Production of Fame and Gender

Felicia Hemans died in 1835, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon, in her “Stanzas on the Death of Mrs Hemans”, celebrated her colleague’s purity, femininity and intensity of feelings. However, she also criticised the deceased woman’s hostility towards celebrity, which, she argued, contributed towards her loneliness, anguish, sadness and eventual death: “Didst thou not tremble at thy fame/ and loathe its bitter prize,/ While what to others triumph seemed,/To thee was sacrifice?” Contrary to Hemans, Landon cherished her popularity, acclaim and stardom – her affairs were as legendary (although untrue) as Lord Byron’s – and she was keen to promote herself as writer, woman, social and literary phenomenon.