Paris Review Introduces 'Female Byron'

Learn about  Letitia Elizabeth Landon in Lucasta Miller's recent contribution to the Paris Review. Miller is the author of L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated “Female Byron” (Knopf); her subject, Landon, was one of the preeminent female poets in the age of Byron. "Known by her initials 'L.E.L.' and called the 'female Byron' in her day," Miller explains, "she was born in London in 1802, and found dead in 1838, a bottle of prussic acid in her hand, a few weeks after arriving at Cape Coast Castle in West Africa. It was a fittingly dramatic end to a short but tumultuous life as one of London’s most talked about literary phenomenons." From there: 

Her career coincided exactly with the strange pause. When she published her first poem as a teenager, the second generation of Romantics were still alive: Keats (died 1821), Shelley (1822), and Byron (1824). But by the end of her life, Dickens’s Oliver Twist was the new literary sensation, and the world of Regency rakes and Romantic rebels had been swept away by the new Victorian values. Symbolically enough, her last public appearance in London was on a balcony overlooking Queen Victoria’s coronation procession. It was as if she simply could not survive under the incoming regime.

Her death left a nasty taste in the mouth of the literary industry, and her reputation soon declined in this new Victorian climate. Although her contemporary admirers included Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Heinrich Heine, Edgar Allan Poe, and the young Brontës, by the twentieth century, if she was remembered at all, her work was dismissed as insipid: the incontinent outpourings of a virgin fantasist who penned vapid sentimental verses about flowers, birds, and lovelorn ladies.

In reality, both her poetry and her life were rather more complex. The lovelorn ladies she ventriloquized spoke in voices that were far from bland, and the flowers and birds were often metaphors for the unmentionable topics of sex and suicide. Moreover, she was far from being a virgin. Over the course of her high-profile career, she gave birth in secret to three illegitimate babies, products of a long-standing relationship with an older, married man. The truth about her private life was airbrushed out of history by her contemporary memoirists and, incredibly, only came to light within the past twenty years.

Read on at Paris Review.