L.E.L.
The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated “Female Byron”
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A famous poet, a mysterious death and a story stranger than fiction. - this is the lost life and mytserious death of the 'Female Byron'
On 15 October 1838, the body of a thirty-six-year-old woman was found in Cape Coast Castle, West Africa, a bottle of prussic acid in her hand. She was one of the most famous English poets of her day: Letitia Elizabeth Landon, known by her initials 'L.E.L.'
What was she doing in Africa? Was her death an accident? Had she committed suicide, or even been murdered?
To her contemporaries, she was an icon, hailed as the 'female Byron'. However, she was also a woman with secrets, the mother of three illegitimate children whose existence was subsequently wiped from the record. After her death, she became the subject of a cover-up which this book unravels, excavating with it a whole lost literary culture.
FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE BRONTE MYTH
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Literary critic Miller (The Bront Myth) organizes this lively biography of a once famous, now obscure 19th-century English poet around new revelations regarding her secret sexual history. Landon's long affair with her mentor, influential editor William Jerdan, produced three children and also provides the key, Miller argues, "to understanding her life... and much of her poetry." Using primary sources, Miller reconstructs how Landon created her "poetic brand" as "L.E.L.," attaining celebrity at age 22 with her 1824 bestseller, The Improvisatrice, and incessantly depicting unrequited and self-destructive love even while hiding her status as a "fallen woman." Miller reads Landon's work generously and well, finding "bitter and cynical depths" in "seemingly na ve sentimentalism." However, Miller displays ambivalence toward her subject, a "split personality" unhealthily attached to the predatory "Svengali" Jerdan, which eventually destroyed her reputation, ultimately making her a pathetic figure who sought escape from a fading career in an unhappy marriage to a British colonial official in West Africa before her death, possibly by suicide, at age 36. Still, with its textured background and lively voice, Miller's biography vividly restores a forgotten author and her faded world, that of the "strange pause" between the Romantics and the Victorians.
