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

Introduction; or, What You Will -- Genteel Appropriations of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762): Sex, Sensibility, and Taste in Victorian Family Biography by Magdalena Nerio -- A Vindication of the Woman Known as Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) -- The Constructed Letters of Mary Hays (1759-1843) -- So Irish; so modish, so mixtish, so wild": Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) (1781-1838) and The Makings of a Life.-Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802-1838) -- Whose Poetess?The After-Lives of Felicia Hemans (1793-1835): Biographical Misconstructions.-"Stuck Through with a Pin and Beautifully Preserved": Curating the Life of "Elizabeth Barrett Browning" -- Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) Autobiography, Biography, and Literary Legacies -- Caroline Norton (1808-1877): The Injured Wife, Scandal, and the Politics of Feminist Memory -- The Biographer as Biographee: Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) -- Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855): (Un)Masked Author to Mythic Woman -- An Unconventional and Contradictory Life: Lady Florence Dixie -- A Woman Whom Men Could More Than Love": Transfiguring the Unlovely in George Eliot (1819-1880) -- Irony upon Irony: The Persistence of Gordon Haight's Perceptions of Edith Simcox (1844-1901).;This book is an investigation of the biases, contradictions, errors, ambiguities, gaps, and historical contexts in biographies of controversial British women who published during the long nineteenth century, many of them left unchecked and perpetuated from publication to publication. Fourteen scholars analyze the agenda, problems, and strengths of biographical material, highlighting the flaws, deficiencies, and influences that have distorted the portraits of women such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Sydney Owenson, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Caroline Norton, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, Lady Florence Dixie, George Eliot, and Edith Simcox. Through exposing distortions, this fascinating study demonstrates that biographies are often more about the biographer than they are about the biographee and that they are products of the time in which they are written. 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."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. 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.' 0What was she doing in Africa? Was her death an accident, as the inquest claimed? Or had she committed suicide, or even been murdered? 0To her contemporaries, she was an icon, hailed as the `female Byron', admired by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Heinrich Heine, the young Bronte sisters and Edgar Allan Poe. 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 is only now unravelling. 0Too scandalous for her reputation to survive, Letitia Landon was a brilliant woman who made a Faustian pact in a ruthless world. She embodied the post-Byronic era, the `strange pause' between the Romantics and the Victorians. This new investigation into the mystery of her life, work and death excavates a whole lost literary culture 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, as the inquest claimed? Or had she committed suicide, or even been murdered? To her contemporaries, she was an icon, hailed as the 'female Byron', admired by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Heinrich Heine, the young Brontë sisters and Edgar Allan Poe. 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 is only now unravelling. Too scandalous for her reputation to survive, Letitia Landon was a brilliant woman who made a Faustian pact in a ruthless world. She embodied the post-Byronic era, the 'strange... 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