Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Letitia Elizabeth Landon was an English poet and novelist, better known by her initials L.E.L. Her first major breakthrough came with The Improvisatrice and she developed the metrical romance towards the Victorian ideal of the Victorian monologue, influencing fellow English writers such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson and Christina Rossetti. Her influence can also be found in the United States, where she was very popular. Edgar Allan Poe regarded her genius as self-evident.
In spite of her wide influence, due to the perceived immorality of Landon's lifestyle, her works were largely ignored or misrepresented after her death. Landon's writings are emblematic of the transition from Romanticism to Victorian literature.

Early life

Letitia Elizabeth Landon was born on 14 August 1802 in Chelsea, London to John Landon and Catherine Jane, née Bishop.
A precocious child, Landon learned to read as a toddler; a disabled neighbour would scatter letter tiles on the floor and reward young Letitia for reading, and, according to her father, "she used to bring home many rewards".
At the age of five, Landon began attending Frances Arabella Rowden's school at 22 Hans Place, Knightsbridge. Rowden was an engaging teacher, a poet, and had a particular enthusiasm for the theatre. According to Mary Russell Mitford, "she had a knack of making poetesses of her pupils". Other pupils of Rowden include Caroline Ponsonby, later Lady Caroline Lamb; Emma Roberts, the travel writer; Anna Maria Fielding, who published as Mrs S. C. Hall; and Rosina Doyle Wheeler, who married Edward Bulwer-Lytton and published her many novels as Rosina Bulwer Lytton. At Rowden's school, Landon became fluent in French from an early age.
The Landons moved to the countryside in 1809, so that John Landon could carry out a model farm project. Letitia Landon was educated at home by her older cousin Elizabeth from that point on. Elizabeth found her knowledge and abilities outstripped by those of her pupil: "When I asked Letitia any question relating either to history, geography, grammar – Plutarch's Lives, or to any book we had been reading, I was pretty certain her answers would be perfectly correct; still, not exactly recollecting, and unwilling she should find out just then that I was less learned than herself, I used thus to question her: 'Are you quite certain?'... I never knew her to be wrong."
When young, Landon was close to her younger brother, Whittington Henry, born 1804. Paying for university education for him, at Worcester College, Oxford, was one of the reasons that brought Landon to publish. She also supported his preferment and later dedicated her poetical illustration Captain Cook to him, in recollection of their domestic childhood adventures together. Whittington went on to become a minister and published a book of sermons in 1835. Rather than showing appreciation for his sister's assistance, he spread false rumours about her marriage and death. Landon also had a younger sister, Elizabeth Jane, who was a frail child and died in 1819 at the age of 13. Little is known of Elizabeth, but her death likely left a lasting impression on Letitia, and it could be Elizabeth who is referred to in the poem "The Forgotten One".

Literary career

Early career: 1820–1834

An agricultural depression caused the Landon family to move back to London in 1815. There, John Landon met William Jerdan, editor of The Literary Gazette. According to Mrs A. T. Thomson, Jerdan took notice of the young Letitia Landon when he saw her coming down the street, "trundling a hoop with one hand, and holding in the other a book of poems, of which she was catching a glimpse between the agitating course of her evolutions". Jerdan later described her ideas as "original and extraordinary". He encouraged Landon's poetic endeavours, and her first poem was published under the single initial "L" in the Gazette in 1820, when Landon was 18. The following year, with financial support from her grandmother, Landon published a book of poetry, The Fate of Adelaide, under her full name. The book met with little critical notice, but sold well; Landon, however, received no profits, since the publisher shortly went out of business. The same month that The Fate of Adelaide appeared, Landon published two poems under the initials "L.E.L." in the Gazette; these poems, and the initials under which they were published, attracted much discussion and speculation. As contemporary critic Laman Blanchard put it, the initials L.E.L. "speedily became a signature of magical interest and curiosity". Bulwer Lytton wrote that, as a young college student, he and his classmates would

rush every Saturday afternoon for the Literary Gazette, an impatient anxiety to hasten at once to that corner of the sheet which contained the three magical letters L.E.L. And all of us praised the verse, and all of us guessed at the author. We soon learned it was a female, and our admiration was doubled, and our conjectures tripled.

Landon served as the Gazettes chief reviewer as she continued to write poetry and she soon began to display an interest in art, which she projected into her poetic productions. She began, in innovative fashion, with a series on Medallion Wafers, which were commercially produced highly decorative letter seals. This was closely followed in the Literary Gazette by a Poetical Catalogue of Pictures, which was to be 'continued occasionally' and which in fact continued unremarked into 1824, the year her landmark volume, The Improvisatrice; and Other Poems was published. A further group of these poems was published in 1825 in her next volume, The Troubadour, as Poetical Sketches of Modern Pictures. In The Troubadour she included a lament for her late father, who died in 1824, thus forcing her to write to support her family; Some contemporaries saw this profit-motive as detrimental to the quality of Landon's work: a woman was not supposed to be a professional writer. Also, by 1826, Landon's reputation began to suffer as rumours circulated that she had had affairs or secretly borne children. However, her further volumes of poetry continued to be favourably reviewed, these being The Golden Violet with its Tales of Romance and Chivalry and Other Poems and The Venetian Bracelet, The Lost Pleiad, A History of the Lyre, and Other Poems. During these years she became known as the 'female Byron'.
The new trend of annual gift books provided her with new opportunities for continuing her engagement with art through combinations of an engraved artwork and what she came to call 'a poetical illustration'. In the 1830s she became a highly valued artist in this field, included amongst her work, most of the poetry for Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Books from 1832 through to 1839. Sarah Sheppard describes this work thus: 'How did pictures ever seem to speak to her soul! how would she seize on some interesting characteristic in the painting or engraving before her, and inspire it with new life, till that pictured scene spread before you in bright association with some touching history or spirit-stirring poem! L.E.L.'s appreciation of painting, like that of music, was intellectual rather than mechanical,—belonging to the combinations rather than to the details; she loved the poetical effects and suggestive influences of the Arts, although caring not for their mere technicalities.' In the words of Glenn T. Hines, 'What L.E.L.'s readers appreciated in her creations was that "new life" that she brought to her subject. Her imaginative re-castings produced intellectual pleasure for her audience. The wonderful characteristic of L.E.L.'s writings, which her readers recognized, was the author's special creative capacity to bring new meanings to her audience.'
Landon continued to publish poetry, and published her first work of prose in 1831 with her first novel, Romance and Reality. The following year, she produced her only volume of religious poetry, The Easter Gift, again as illustrations to engravings of artwork. Next she was responsible for the whole of Heath's Book of Beauty, 1833, her most self-consciously Byronic volume, which opens with The Enchantress in which she creates a 'Promethean, distinctly Luciferan, model of poetic identity and self-creation'. She returned to the long poem with The Zenana in the Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1834 and gave the 1835 Scrap Book a sting in the tale with The Fairy of the Fountains, Landon's version of the Melusine legend displaying 'the aesthetic dilemma of the woman poet who is exiled not once like the male poet, but twice'. 1834 also saw the publication of her second novel, Francesca Carrara, of which one reviewer commented 'A sterner goddess never presided over the destinies of a novel'.
In July that year Landon visited Paris with a friend, Miss Turin, who was unfortunately taken ill, restricting Landon's activities. However, amongst those she met were Heinrich Heine, Prosper Mérimée, Chateaubriand and Madame Tastu.

Engagement John Forster: 1835–1836

In 1835, Landon became engaged to John Forster. Forster became aware of rumours regarding Landon's sexual activity, and asked her to refute them. Landon responded that Forster should "make every inquiry in power", which Forster did; after he pronounced himself satisfied, however, Landon broke off their engagement. To him, she wrote:

The more I think, the more I feel I ought not – I can not – allow you to unite yourself with one accused of – I can not write it. The mere suspicion is dreadful as death. Were it stated as a fact, that might be disproved. Were it a difficulty of any other kind, I might say, Look back at every action of my life, ask every friend I have. But what answer can I give...? I feel that to give up all idea of a near and dear connection is as much my duty to myself as to you....

Privately, Landon stated that she would never marry a man who had mistrusted her. In a letter to Bulwer Lytton, she wrote that "if his future protection is to harass and humiliate me as much as his present – God keep me from it... I cannot get over the entire want of delicacy to me which could repeat such slander to myself."
A further volume of poetry, The Vow of the Peacock, was published in 1835 and, in 1836, a volume of stories and poetry for children, Traits and Trials of Early Life. The History of a Child from this volume may draw on the surroundings of her childhood but the circumstances of the story are so unlike the known facts of her early life that it can scarcely be considered as autobiographical.