The Heroines of Henry Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellows 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 Longfellows major heroines, placing them in the context of Longfellows body of work and the poets interests in theology, politics, and history. Though Longfellows heroines have sometimes been dismissed as mere domestic caricatures, Bartel argues that Longfellows heroines are nothing of the sort. Instead, they provide us with unique pictures of how ones individual talents and desires can be harmonized with the Christian ideals of communal justice, ethical living, and ultimate union with the Divine.