L.E.L.
The Lost Life and Mysterious Death of the 'Female Byron'
Published on 3. December 2020
Book
Paperback/Softback
416 pages
978-0-09-950359-0 (ISBN)
Description
A famous poet, a mysterious death and a story stranger than fiction. - this is the lost life and mytserious death of the 'Female Byron'
On 15 October 1838, the body of a thirty-six-year-old woman was found in Cape Coast Castle, West Africa, a bottle of prussic acid in her hand. She was one of the most famous English poets of her day: Letitia Elizabeth Landon, known by her initials 'L.E.L.'
What was she doing in Africa? Was her death an accident? Had she committed suicide, or even been murdered?
To her contemporaries, she was an icon, hailed as the 'female Byron'. However, she was also a woman with secrets, the mother of three illegitimate children whose existence was subsequently wiped from the record. After her death, she became the subject of a cover-up which this book unravels, excavating with it a whole lost literary culture.
FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE BRONTE MYTH
On 15 October 1838, the body of a thirty-six-year-old woman was found in Cape Coast Castle, West Africa, a bottle of prussic acid in her hand. She was one of the most famous English poets of her day: Letitia Elizabeth Landon, known by her initials 'L.E.L.'
What was she doing in Africa? Was her death an accident? Had she committed suicide, or even been murdered?
To her contemporaries, she was an icon, hailed as the 'female Byron'. However, she was also a woman with secrets, the mother of three illegitimate children whose existence was subsequently wiped from the record. After her death, she became the subject of a cover-up which this book unravels, excavating with it a whole lost literary culture.
FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE BRONTE MYTH
Reviews / Votes
In her biography of L.E.L., Lucasta Miller's stellar research blows two centuries of accumulated dust off a phenomenon worth unearthing... This book takes biography to a new level. * New Statesman * Lucasta Miller's fine literary detective work yields a riveting, tantalisingly ambiguous portrait of a poet whose confessional voice and savvy celebrity make her only more intriguing to modern readers. -- Hephzibah Anderson * Observer * Wonderfully entertaining... Spellbinding. * New York Times Book Review * A terrific book... A compelling life of the victim of a misogynist celebrity culture, a rich mix of literary criticism and impeccable research, which reads like a novel - you keep turning the pages to discover whatever will happen next to the unfortunate L.E.L.. * Daily Telegraph * Compelling as a detective story, Miller's revelatory life of Landon is a masterpiece of eloquent scholarship... Miller's real genius lies in her forensic ability to disentangle reality from romance... splendid. * Literary Review * Miller explores the seedy underbelly of the era with panache... Miller's definitive biography restores to life a poet who influenced writers such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti and Charlotte Bronte. * The Times * Miller is a brilliant explicator of the troubled trail of fact and fiction that biography leaves in its wake... a fierce and enthralling book. * New York Review of Books * A searching biography that uses historical detective work to address the riddle of a brilliant poet's dramatic early death... L.E.L. offers a vivid, if often bleak, picture of the life and times of an extraordinary woman. Miller handles the complex story of Landon's life with the pace and skill of a novelist, and her book should fascinate anyone interested in the history of British women's writing, or anyone who has ever looked at histories of Romantic and Victorian literature and wondered what, exactly, happened in the gap between the two. * BBC History Magazine * In a brilliant work of literary resuscitation, Lucasta Miller explores Landon's forgotten poetry and vigorously challenges the legacy of "lies and evasions" surrounding her... brilliantly informative. * Evening Standard * This is biography as liberation, in which a woman's story is allowed to stand on its own terms. It its firmly in the within a tradition of seminal accounts of complex women - Claire Tomalin's The Invisible Woman, Amanda Foreman's Georgiana, Lucasta Miller's own Bronte Myth - in which the power of the genre to bear witness to the complexity of women's lives is everywhere apparent. * Times Literary Supplement *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Vintage Publishing
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 197 mm
Width: 128 mm
Thickness: 27 mm
Weight
350 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-09-950359-0 (9780099503590)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Lucasta Miller
L.E.L.
The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated "Female Byron"
E-Book
05/2019
Vintage Digital
€9.99
Available for download
Person
Lucasta Miller is a biographer and critic, whose articles have appeared in a wide number of publications, especially the Guardian. She is the author of two previous books on nineteenth-century literature, The Bronte Myth and L.E.L.: the Lost Life and Mysterious Death of the 'Female Byron', and is currently an Honorary Research Associate at University College, London and a Royal Literary Fund Fellow.