The Heroines of Henry Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poems are filled with powerful heroines, from Evangeline, the exiled wanderer, to Vittoria Colonna, the aging genius of the Italian renaissance. In The Heroines of Henry Longfellow: Domestic, Defiant, Divine, Timothy E. G. Bartel provides a survey of Longfellow’s major heroines, placing them in the context of Longfellow’s body of work and the poet’s interests in theology, politics, and history. Though Longfellow’s heroines have sometimes been dismissed as mere domestic caricatures, Bartel argues that Longfellow’s heroines are nothing of the sort. Instead, they provide us with unique pictures of how one’s individual talents and desires can be harmonized with the Christian ideals of communal justice, ethical living, and ultimate union with the Divine.