L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated ‘Female Byron’, by Lucasta Miller
NICOLA SHULMAN
L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated ‘Female Byron’
Many years ago, on honeymoon in Japan, I spent a weekend at the Kurashiki house of a portly English art dealer called Michael Gorman and his Japanese wife, Mizue. A conspicuous figure in the province, Gorman drove a primroseyellow vintage Bentley round the neat, green rice-fields; and his hobbies, as I recall, were history, old French brandy, and épatering Mizue’s relations by telling them that Japanese culture was Korean. In 2005, he extended the scope of his scandalising operations into the world of English literature, with the announcement that he was a direct descendant of the early-19th-century poet Letitia Landon.
On the face of it, that was impossible. Landon killed herself in 1838, in what is now Ghana, eight weeks into her one and only marriage, to the Governor of Cape Coast Castle. But Gorman was right. Landon was the mother of three illegitimate children fathered by her publisher, William Jerdan, editor of a powerfully influential journal, the Literary Gazette. This had been known in narrow circles and vulgarly hinted at in her own lifetime, but her biographers had succeeded in erasing it from her afterlife. Its re-emergence in indisputable form has prompted Lucasta Miller to engage her formidable talents in a reassessment of Landon’s career. The resulting book far overreaches its biographical brief, to become what Miller calls Landon’s poetry: ‘an authentic dispatch from the hypocrisy culture in which Letitia … lived’. The effect of such a culture on the whole notion of ‘authenticity’ is the theme of Miller’s excellent book, which should become required reading for anyone interested in the effects of social hypocrisy, and in the feminine predicament as a whole.
Who was L.E.L.? No one hears of her now, though she was a great name in the 1820s, her craft bobbing in the trough between the two giant breakers of Romantic and Victorian letters. In some ways this was a vital moment for women writers, as they were held to be the natural inheritors of those springs of raw sentiment that had animated romantic poetry and could pour out the truth about love. At the same time, the rules of romantic engagement were hardening towards the Victorian model, placing sexual conduct under ever closer scrutiny. L.E.L.’S sobriquet, the ‘female Byron’, encapsulates one of the many paradoxes of her role. To be anything like Byron was to behave in a manner that no woman could adopt without forfeiting the protections necessary for social acceptance.
Had she married young, a society that operated on the slippery principles of ‘demi-connaissance’ might have allowed her more licence. As things were, it was the libidinous – and married – Jerdan who spotted the young girl with her ‘exuberance of form’ from his window overlooking the garden of her parents’ Brompton villa. When her father went bankrupt and left the family, it was to this local celebrity that approaches were made, with hopes of monetising Letitia’s precocious literary talent. Jerdan then became her mentor, publisher and manager. The fact that he was also her lover and, soon, the father of her children did nothing to impede him from marketing her as an infant phenomenon, able to improvise verse at length on any subject.
Under these competing pressures, she seems to have become one of those moral mermaids who troubled the imagination of the early 19th century; neither one kind of woman nor another. Was she a vestal oracle – or an experienced sensual woman, as the racy content of her poetry suggested? And then there was the complication of her social presence which, as everyone remarked, was at odds with both of these, being pert, witty and businesslike. Miller manages to keep all these masks in play without losing the sense that there was somebody underneath them. Moreover, her perfect understanding of Landon’s context and situation means she is able to mine the darkest of coalfaces – her poetry – for seams of authentic feeling.
One of the great things about this book is that it’s a London story. Landon had no wilderness or cottage to withdraw to; her reputation was measurable in the street addresses where she lodged, in the houses where she was or was not received. She operated in the masculine world of the literary press, with all its cattiness and ad hominem hostility, at a time when for a woman to be in that market was to forgo her feminine right to male protection.
As one observer remarked, ‘That sort of talent unsexes a woman.’ Accordingly, when the facts of her affair with Jerdan began to emerge, she was exposed to the tempest. It’s a brutal tale, wonderfully told.