‘Lonely and Voiceless Your Halls Must Remain’: Romantic‐Era National Song and Felicia Hemans's Welsh Melodies (1822)

This article places F elicia H emans's little‐discussed song collection A Selection of Welsh Melodies (1822) in the expanding field of eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century national melody in B ritain. Drawing on recent studies of R omantic paratext, it discusses the layered, contingent and interstitial nature of Welsh Melodies , via a series of close readings of the song texts. It argues that H emans's approach to W ales in her songs reveals the collaborative and translational nature of her work, involving cultural and historical transmission, as well as the models of female subjectivity, professional authorship and (at times) feminist sentiment for which she is better known.