This study discusses the importance of the trope of ruins and the paradigm of decline and fall to the rhetoric of nationalism and imperialism in Felicia Hemans's Modern Greece. Contingent to this subject is an exploration of the ways in which female writers of the Romantic Period were able to enter the public sphere and broach the often male-gendered topoi of nationalism, travel, and empire by adopting differing patriotic stances and unique narratological structures. This essay appears in _Romanticism and Patriotism: Nation, Empire, Bodies, Rhetoric_, a volume of _Romantic Circles Praxis Series_, prepared exclusively for Romantic Circles (http://www.rc.umd.edu/), University of Maryland.