L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated "Female Byron"

by Lucasta Miller

Overview

A lost nineteenth-century literary life, brilliantly rediscovered—Letitia Elizabeth Landon, hailed as the female Byron; she changed English poetry; her novels, short stories, and criticism, like Byron though in a woman's voice, explored the dark side of sexuality—by the acclaimed author of The Brontë Myth ("wonderfully entertaining . . . spellbinding"—New York Times Book Review; "ingenious"—The New Yorker).

"None among us dares to say / What none will choose to hear"—L.E.L., "Lines of Life"
Letitita Elizabeth Landon—pen name L.E.L.—dared to say it and made sure she was heard.
Hers was a life lived in a blaze of scandal and worship, one of the most famous women of her time, the Romantic Age in London's 1820s, her life and writing on the ascendency as Byron's came to an end.
Lucasta Miller tells the full story and re-creates the literary London of her time. She was born in 1802 and was shaped by the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, a time of conservatism when values were in flux. She began publishing poetry in her teens and came to be known as a daring poet of thwarted romantic love. We see L.E.L. as an emblematic figure who embodied a seismic cultural shift, the missing link between the age of Byron and the creation of Victorianism. Miller writes of Jane Eyre as the direct connection to L.E.L.—its first-person confessional voice, its Gothic extremes, its love triangle, and in its emphasis on sadomasochistic romantic passion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780375412783
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/05/2019
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

LUCASTA MILLER is a British literary critic who has worked for The Independent and The Guardian, and contributed to The Economist, The Times (London), The New Statesman, and the BBC. She was the founding editorial director of Notting Hill Editions and has been a visiting scholar at Wolfson College, Oxford, and a visiting fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She lives in London with her husband, the tenor Ian Bostridge, and their two children.

Read an Excerpt

Prologue
 
Between 8 and 9 o’clock on the morning of Monday 15th October 1838, the body of a thirty-six-year-old Englishwoman, still in her nightclothes, was found on the floor of her dressing-room in Cape Coast Castle, West Africa. She was the new wife of the British Governor, George Maclean, and had arrived there from England only eight weeks previously.
 
Cape Coast Castle was the largest trading fort on the western coast of Africa: a stark white complex bristling with cannon, perched on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean in what is now Ghana. During the eighteenth century, it had been the “grand emporium” of the British slave trade. Countless captives had been held in its underground dungeons before precincts. Following the Abolition Act of 1807, the castle had remained under British command, its dungeons repurposed for housing local “prisoners.”
 
A soldier in the sentry box stood at the entrance to the governor’s quarters, which were decorated in the European style: prints on the walls, a shining mahogany dining table, impressive table silver. The room in which his wife’s body was found, painted a deep blue, featured a toilet table and the deceased’s own portable writing desk, one of those small wooden boxes, typical of the period, that opened to form a sloping writing surface.
 
Deaths from disease among Europeans in what was then known as the “white man’s grave” were not uncommon. Indeed, the fatality rate was so great that the local Methodist missionary was having difficulty recruiting volunteers. But this death was different. In the woman’s hand was a small empty bottle. Her eyes were open and abnormally dilated.
 
The last person to see the governor’s wife alive was her maid Emily Bailey, who had traveled out with her from England. She later testified that she had found Mrs Maclean “well” when she went in to see her earlier that morning. On her return half an hour later, Emily Bailey had had difficulty opening the door. It had been blocked by her mistress’s body.
 
Soon after Mrs Bailey raised the alarm, the castle surgeon arrived. He attempted to revive the patient, but in vain. Garbled news soon spread to the nearby hills. Brodie Cruickshank, a young Scottish merchants’ agent, arrived at the fort within the hour, mistakenly supposing that it was the governor himself who had perished. In his memoir Eighteen Years on the Gold Coast of Africa, he later recalled his shock on entering the room where Mrs. Maclean’s body had been laid out on a bed. He had dined with the Macleans only the evening before, when she had appeared to be in “perfect health”. The governor himself was in the room. He had slid down into a chair and was silently staring into space, his face “crushed”.
 
Later that very day, an inquest was held at the castle, the jury hastily convened from among the local merchant community. No autopsy was performed, but the empty bottle was produced in evidence and its label carefully transcribed: “Acid Hydrocianicum Delatum, Pharm. Lond. 1836, Medium Dose Five Minims, being about one-third the strength of that in former use, prepared by Scheele’s proof.” The deceased was said to have been in the habit of using the contents, prussic acid in everyday parlance, for medicinal reasons, and to have taken too much by mistake. A verdict of accidental death was recorded.
 
After the inquest, the corpse was hastily interred under the parade ground. During the burial, a tropical shower burst from the sky in such torrents that a tarpaulin had to be erected over the gravediggers. By the time the final paving stone was replaced it had grown dark. The workmen finished the job by torchlight.
 
West Africa was so remote from England that it was not until the morning of January 1, 1839, that a discreet death notice appeared in The Times:
 
At Cape Coast Castle, Africa, on Monday, the 15th of October last, suddenly, Mrs. L.E. Maclean, wife of George Maclean Esq., Governor of Cape Coast Castle.
 
But after the evening Courier revealed the woman’s maiden name later that day, the story became headline news. She was one of the most famous writers in England: Letitia Elizabeth Landon, better known by her initials, “L.E.L.”

Table of Contents

Preface xi

Prologue 1

Chapter 1 The Tangled Web 4

Chapter 2 The Three Magical Letters 13

Chapter 3 Keeping Up Appearances 33

Chapter 4 The Songbird and the Trainer 59

Chapter 5 Fame 83

Chapter 6 Shame 103

Chapter 7 Lyre Liar 123

Chapter 8 The Cash Nexus 147

Chapter 9 French Connections 169

Chapter 10 Vile Links 193

Chapter 11 The Governor 224

Chapter 12 Engagement 241

Chapter 13 Heart of Darkness 263

Chapter 14 Cover-up 283

Chapter 15 Hauntings 306

Acknowledgments 321

Notes 325

Bibliography 361

Index 379

Editorial Reviews

11/12/2018
Literary critic Miller (The Brontë 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 naïve 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. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2018-11-12

A scholarly, riveting life of an English poet and novelist whose precocious career ended in sexual scandal and controversy about her sudden death.

Literary critic Miller (The Brontë Myth, 2004), the founding editorial director of independent British publisher Notting Hill Editions, successfully returns to public awareness the astonishing (and brief) career and achievements of Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802-1838), who, for a time, seemed to create poems as easily as she breathed. However, her personal life—scandalous to the emerging Victorians—sent her stock plummeting, and she died in West Africa of causes whose mysteries Miller does much to dispel. The author begins with Landon's death, provides a quick sketch of her initial popularity, and then returns to a fairly strict chronology. Miller describes her subject's background and her long association and sexual relationship with her married mentor, William Jerdan, editor at the time of the Literary Gazette. Jerdan promoted her career—and sired her three children, none of whom remained in her care, or his. For a while, L.E.L., as she signed her pieces, was a literary sensation, and Miller places her as sort of a transitional figure between the Romantics (Shelley, Byron et al.) and the Victorians. The text, in fact, is populated heavily with literary heavyweights, including Dickens, the Brontës, Poe, Woolf, and numerous others. The extent of Miller's research is impressive and includes her visit to the scene of Landon's death. The author seems to have read everything even marginally relevant, and she maintains a strong auctorial presence, noting—bluntly and accurately—the era's male literary dominance and the grotesque double standard of private behavior. Libidinous men suffered few consequences: Jerdan himself moved on to another teenager after he tired of Landon.

A thorough, engaging, and even loving restoration of a woman writer whose story needed to be told and whose works required fresh, attentive eyes.

Kirkus Reviews

Praise for Lucasta Miller's L.E.L.:

"Lucasta Miller's stellar research blows two centuries of accumulated dust off a phenomenon worth knowing ... This book takes biography to a new level ... We see the network of manipulations, hypocrisy, commercial evil. Miller's investigation into the corroded promise of one young life opens up an abyss and, holding our gaze, speaks eloquently to the present."—Lyndall Gordon, New Statesman

"Compelling as a detective story, Miller's revelatory life of Landon is a masterpiece of eloquent scholarship ... Miller, like Germaine Greer before her, discerns a proto-modern vein in Landon's combination of an absent self with a voice of compelling intimacy."—Miranda Seymour, Literary Review

"Few figures of the Romantic era are as enigmatic as the poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon ... This intrepid biography examines her eclipse in light of a scandal that surrounded her ... Miller's subtle readings of a poet whom she calls 'proto-postmodern' restore a lost reputation."—The New Yorker

"L.E.L.'s 'lost life' recovers the rakish oddity of a neglected period in literary history; the result is a compelling and moving narrative of a woman and her world ... This is biography as liberation, in which a woman's story is allowed to stand on its own terms."—Daisy Hay, Times Literary Supplement

"A luminous and engaging literary mystery supported by thoughtful and exhaustive research ... a necessary story about English literature, one that cannot be overlooked."—Theresa Upko, Bustle

"L.E.L. is the first biography of Landon to explore recent revelations about her life, and the literary critic Lucasta Miller's sleuthing delivers an unexpected result. The figure who emerges from her pages is not just a missing link in literary Romanticism, but a progenitor of something modern."—Nicholas Dames, The Atlantic

"A valiant recovery job—the life of a writer, a woman first celebrated, then notorious, in her time and nearly forgotten today ... infinitely rich."—Katherine A. Powers, The Wall Street Journal

"Miller resurrects the all-but-forgotten life and once radiant career of Letitia Elizabeth Landon ... A compelling examination of an unjustly marginalized literary life."—Booklist

"Textured and lively ... Miller's biography vividly restores a forgotten author and her faded world, that of the 'strange pause' between the Romantics and the Victorians."—Publishers Weekly

"A riveting life of an English poet and novelist whose precocious career ended in sexual scandal and controversy ... The extent of Miller's research is impressive ... A thorough, engaging, and even loving restoration."—Kirkus (starred review)

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