Landon Letitia Elizabeth - L. E. L.: the lost life and scandalous death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon: the celebrated female Byron

This book is about a poet who disappeared: about a woman who pursued her career in a blaze of publicity while leading a secret life that eventually destroyed her, and who left a such a legacy of lies and evasion that her true story can only now be told.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon, who published under her initials, L.E.L., was feted as the female Byron during the 1820s. But after she was found dead in 1838, in West Africa of all places and in suspicious circumstances, the early Victorian publishing industry closed ranks to erase what they had come to see as her shameful history. Her literary reputation declined. She was left on the margins, surrounded by an aura of mystery and occlusion, her work routinely misunderstood.

Over the past couple of decades, she has finally begun to attract more interest. Her work has begun to appear in anthologies of nineteenth-century verse and to be analyzed in scholarly articles. She has even begun to feature in a minor way on many university English literature syllabuses. At the same time, biographical researchers outside the mainstream academy have been collecting increasing documentation. Yet these disparate and uncoordinated efforts have still left a haunting vacuum where Letitia Landon ought to be.

The process of uncovering her has proved both troublesome and troubling. Unlike some marginal figures, she was so famous in her lifetime that she is surrounded by a vast wealth of material, including numerous memoirs published by her contemporaries in the aftermath of her death. Such seemingly trustworthy sources, however, frequently turn out to be a tissue of equivocation, half-truths, and downright deceit. Even her own letters can on occasion be shown to tell lies. Often the only way to establish the forensic facts of her life is by recourse to public documents, such as censuses, parish records, and wills, though those, too, sometimes contain demonstrable falsehoods.

Most challenging is the problem of interpreting her literary voice, whose unnerving qualities were, as this book will show, the direct result of the fact that it was impossible for her to speak openly. Obsessively circling around her absent I, her poetry gives away both more and less than it promises. To those who met her in the flesh she was a shape-shifter, who did in truth resemble the disputed colour of the chameleon, changing its hues with the changeful lights around. Critics lent her others names as if she had no identity of her own: she was the new Corinne or the English improvisatrice, the female Byron, or the Sappho of a polished age. Even her friends did not know whether to refer to her as Miss Landon or by her nom de plume L.E.L., using both interchangeably.

What to call Landon, or L.E.L. whateer thy name, as one contemporary satirist put it, remains a problem. In this book, I have tried to use L.E.L. when referring to her works and Letitia when telling the story of her life. If I do not always stick to that rule, it is because she made the boundary between her different selves so tantalizingly ambiguous.