Who now reads L.E.L.? asks Lucasta Miller, as she seeks to restore Landon to the temple of the muses
L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated “Female Byron”.was the Sappho of her age, a Scheherazade and a Becky Sharp. She wore many masks. Guileless ingénue. Poet of unspoken passions. Mistress to her editor. Wronged woman. A fly caught in gossip’s web. A prolific author of verse, fiction and literary hackwork. She wrote under her initials—“L.E.L.”—with their echoes of “elle” and “hell”.
Who now reads L.E.L? asks Lucasta Miller, as she seeks to restore Landon to the temple of the muses. In life, Landon was wounded by gossip—“the spiders of society/ They weave their petty webs of lies and sneers”—and by the “cold mockery” of the critics. She has suffered worse in death. In “Middlemarch” George Eliot makes the silly, spendthrift Rosamond Vincy a fan. In Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando”, the hero-turned-heroine is aghast to find herself in the early 19th century with L.E.L.
Born in 1802, she was indeed a schoolgirl when she began writing. She lived with her grandmother in the new London suburb of Brompton . Across the way was William Jerdan, editor of the, his wife and their young family. In 1820 Landon, aged 18, sent her governess to Jerdan with a note. A young lady unknown to him “ventures to intrude the enclosed lines”. He published them, made her famous and made her his mistress. Thomas Carlyle called Jerdan the “satyr-cannibal Literary Gazeteer”.
In Landon’s poems love is ever unrequited and power seldom in the woman’s hands: “The love which is as life to me/Is but a simple toy to you.” It could not last. The lustful, live-and-let-live Regency would become the laced and hypocritical age of Victoria. “Fame” and “shame” is a commonly recurring rhyme in Landon’s songs. The only hope for her almost-ruined reputation was to marry. George Maclean, British governor of Cape Coast Castle , obliged.
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