UNSPECIFIED - CIRCA 1800: Letitia Elizabeth Landon 1802 to 1838 English poet and novelist Engraved by J Thomson after G Machse From the book The National Portrait Gallery Volume IV published c1820 (Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)
Letitia Landon © Getty

On the morning of October 15 1838, at Cape Coast Castle in present-day Ghana, the body of the new wife of Governor George Maclean, the British official in charge of the region, was found in her drawing-room, clutching an empty bottle of prussic acid. Now commonly known as hydrogen cyanide, the toxic substance was at the time readily available via prescription or over the counter.

Mrs Maclean had been in west Africa for exactly two months; no autopsy was performed before burial and an inquest ruled her death an accident. It was only when the news of her demise reached England in January 1839 that rumours of suicide and even murder began to circulate, for the late 36-year-old was no stranger to scandal. As Letitia Elizabeth Landon she had, since she was “a lady yet in her teens”, been a widely published writer of poetry, novels and reviews under the pseudonym L.E.L., and one of the most feted, frowned upon — and subsequently forgotten — celebrities of her day.

Lucasta Miller, whose The Brontë Myth (2001) was a dazzling challenge to and exploration of the cult around the lives of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, takes on in L.E.L. a literary figure whom she initially anticipated, as she comments in her postscript, “might be relatively quick to dispatch” as “a minor subject”.

The result is an energetic, fascinating and deeply researched book which is as much about the “strange pause” — the slippery, ambiguous hinterland in literature and history between the end of the Romantic era of Shelley, Byron and Keats, and the beginning of the Victorian age — as it is about Letitia Landon herself.

In 1820s and 1830s London, Miller uncovers a thriving publishing culture of hacks and literary wannabes with L.E.L. — the persona indistinguishable from the person — at its centre. It was a time when reputations and fortunes were made and lost in the blink of an eye, and the unquestioned double standard of ignoring men’s social and sexual transgressions while excoriating and shunning women for similar behaviour seems wearily familiar.

Landon’s early ambition and alacrity with words found its mirror in her audience; her poems, abundant with floral imagery and innuendo, hinted at tragic love and loss. Yet she needed always to earn her living and support her vaguely employed younger brother; their father had lost the family money early.

The eager readers of L.E.L.’s first published verses knew none of this, nor that the mysterious teenage prodigy was the mistress of William Jerdan, her editor at the Literary Gazette, who was married and 20 years her senior. When her identity was revealed in 1824, the public couldn’t get enough of her carefully cultivated image.

Later, when the newly founded Sunday Times implicated Landon in a relationship with Jerdan, it was she who became the everlasting brunt of gossip and humiliation. Her greatest secret was the three children she bore Jerdan and gave up for adoption: although the rumour periodically resurfaced while she was alive, it was not until 2000 that an article in the London Review of Books by Cynthia Lawford confirmed that they had existed at all.

Later, when the newly founded Sunday Times implicated Landon in a relationship with Jerdan, it was she who became the everlasting brunt of gossip and humiliation. Her greatest secret was the three children she bore Jerdan and gave up for adoption: although the rumour periodically resurfaced while she was alive, it was not until 2000 that an article in the London Review of Books by Cynthia Lawford confirmed that they had existed at all.

Miller contends that it was this regularly renewed gossip which ultimately led to Landon’s virtual exile in Africa following her hasty, unsuitable marriage to a man with murky dealings in illegal commerce and the slave trade, who already had a family with a local woman.

Maclean’s own dubious background was the source for the serious mutterings of murder, although Miller’s view is that Landon did indeed kill herself, either intentionally or accidentally.

The reasons for Landon’s dwindling reputation (and income) are as understandable as they are complex: a combination of a fickle public, the “spider society” of unreliable friends (who after her death suppressed the more indelicate aspects of Landon’s life as much to protect their own standing as hers), changing literary fashions, the ushering in of a more overtly moral outlook at the end of the Regency period and the loss of her business manager and lover — whom, as Miller shockingly discovers in 19th-century account books, never paid L.E.L. directly for her work.

The story of L.E.L. is salacious enough, but Miller’s skill is to address and capture the transient nature of Landon’s fame — an instantly recognisable prototype of self-made celebrity — to retrieve her from history’s doldrums, and demolish the mocking which continued for decades.

George Eliot, who early in her own career inhabited a similar literary demimonde to Landon, thought her work “silly”; for Virginia Woolf it was “insipid”.

Yet, Miller points out, in France, where Landon was well received on a visit in 1834, the reputations of her female writer contemporaries of similar lifestyle endured, and her influence on an early fan who longed for fame of her own, the adolescent Charlotte Bronte, is evident in her own greatest works: Jane Eyre and Villette.

Landon’s 1829 poem “Lines of Life” (“I borrow others’ likeness, till/ Almost I lose my own”) is a brilliant example of her “show not tell” opacity; her quoted correspondence displays exceptional verve and wit even in despair.

For Miller, Landon is predominantly a “post-modern” character and “a textual construct”; the success of this vastly intriguing book is that by its end the reader is of the same conviction.

L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated ‘Female Byron’, by Lucasta Miller, Jonathan Cape, RRP£25, 416 pages

Join our online book group on Facebook at FTBooksCafe. Subscribe to FT Life on YouTube for the latest FT Weekend videos

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024. All rights reserved.
Reuse this content (opens in new window) CommentsJump to comments section

Follow the topics in this article

Comments