Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Letitia Elizabeth Landon, born in Chelsea, London, on 14 August 1802, was an English poet and novelist better known to her readers as L.E.L. She wrote at a moment when English literature was moving from Romanticism toward Victorian forms, and her own work stands at that crossing point. Her first major success was The Improvisatrice; and Other Poems, published in 1824, and she helped develop the metrical romance toward what became the Victorian monologue.

Landon was a precocious child. She learned to read as a toddler, encouraged by a disabled neighbour who scattered letter tiles on the floor and rewarded her for reading them. At five she went to Frances Arabella Rowden’s school at 22 Hans Place, Knightsbridge, where she became fluent in French. Rowden was a poet, an engaging teacher, and, according to Mary Russell Mitford, had “a knack of making poetesses of her pupils.” After the Landon family moved to the countryside in 1809, Letitia was taught at home by her older cousin Elizabeth, who later recalled that the girl’s answers on history, geography, grammar, Plutarch, and other books were almost always correct.

The family returned to London in 1815 after an agricultural depression, and there Landon came to the notice of William Jerdan, editor of The Literary Gazette. Her first poem appeared in the Gazette in 1820 under the single initial “L,” when she was eighteen. In 1821, with help from her grandmother, she published The Fate of Adelaide under her full name. It sold well but brought her no profit, because the publisher soon went out of business. That same month, two poems signed “L.E.L.” appeared in the Gazette, and the initials quickly drew curiosity and admiration.

Through the 1820s Landon became one of the most discussed literary figures of her day. She served as the Gazette’s chief reviewer while continuing to publish poetry, often linking poems with works of art. After The Improvisatrice came The Troubadour in 1825, which included a lament for her father, who had died in 1824. His death forced her to write to support her family, a fact some contemporaries judged harshly because they did not think a woman should be a professional writer. Further volumes followed, including The Golden Violet in 1827 and The Venetian Bracelet, The Lost Pleiad, A History of the Lyre, and Other Poems in 1829. During these years she was sometimes called the “female Byron.”

In the 1830s, the rise of annual gift books gave Landon another outlet for her skill in pairing verse with images. She wrote most of the poetry for Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Books from 1832 through 1839. Her influence reached other English writers, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and Christina Rossetti, and she was also very popular in the United States. Edgar Allan Poe regarded her genius as self-evident. Landon died on 15 October 1838, and after her death her work was often ignored or misrepresented because of rumours about her life. Yet the force of her voice remains clear: intelligent, musical, alert to feeling, and shaped by the demands placed on a woman who made literature her work.