During the 1820s and 1830s, biographies and postmortem commemorations1 – as well as adjacent genres of elegies, engravings and ‘character of writing’ essays – helped to shape popular conceptions of professional authorship and authorial fame in a time of literary transition. Published across a range of periodicals, these genres individually and collectively offered a writer’s life and work as an object of assessment, asking not only who an author was but also what an author’s enduring contribution might be.2 The cultural authority of poets, including female poets, depended on the judgements conferred by critics as well as the content and arrangement of periodicals, which were changing in response to the literary markets of the 1820s and 1830s.

When Felicia Hemans died in May of 1835, the amount of periodical space devoted to her death offers one metric for measuring her perceived authority as a female poet and the developing expectations for authorship in the 1830s. Reviewing the constellation of writing about Hemans at her death also allows us to identify who else sought to gain from her poetic authority and what role commemorative poetry, specifically the elegy, played in this effort. In their elegies to Hemans in The New Monthly Magazine, Letitia Elizabeth Landon and Elizabeth Barrett Browning both laid claim to Hemans’s poetic status by means of their responses to her and to each other. This chapter, therefore, considers Landon and Barrett Browning’s choice of The New Monthly Magazine as a strategic site for engaging with Hemans.