Recovered Voices: The Sources of The Siege of Valencia

This essay analyzes John Home's Siege of Aquileia and Edward Jerningham's Siege of Berwick as crucial source plays for Felicia Hemans's Siege of Valencia. Comparisons show how Hemans's play acts as a corrective to earlier conservative dramas and put Hemans's own controversial politics into more accurate perspective. My argument thus joins recent scholarship by Susan Wolfson, Anne Mellor, and others who counter a perception of Hemans's writings as doctrinaire, conservative, and jingoistic with a more complex vision of her work.