The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated “Female Byron”

L.E.L.

The Lost Life and Mysterious Death of the ‘Female Byron’

A famous poet, a mysterious death and a story stranger than fiction.

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.

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.

Wonderfully entertaining... Spellbinding.

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..

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.

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.

Miller is a brilliant explicator of the troubled trail of fact and fiction that biography leaves in its wake... a fierce and enthralling book.

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.

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.

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 Brontë Myth – in which the power of the genre to bear witness to the complexity of women's lives is everywhere apparent.

A fascinating portrait of a woman and her times and a heartbreaking song of the fickleness of love and fame.

Gripping… with meticulous, precise research.

A valiant recovery job – the life of a writer, a woman first celebrated, then notorious, in her time and nearly forgotten today... [An] infinitely rich literary biography.

Miller wants us to see L.E.L. less as a great poet... and more as an interesting “foremother” of today’s performative culture… [you] will come away from Miller’s excellent biography understanding why she matters.

A sirenic, ultramodern biography. Miller’s sleuth-scholar storytelling engages an inventive tone to unravel hidden, seismic-secrets of the nineteenth-century London literary landscape.

L.E.L. is the first biography of Landon to explore recent revelations about her life, and the literary critic Lucasta Miller's sleuthing delivers an unexpected result. The figure who emerges from her pages is not just a missing link in literary Romanticism, but a progenitor of something modern.

Riveting… A thorough, engaging, and even loving restoration of a woman writer whose story needed to be told and whose works required fresh, attentive eyes.

Miller resurrects the all-but-forgotten life and once radiant career of Letitia Elizabeth Landon... A compelling examination of an unjustly marginalized literary life.

Textured and lively... Miller's biography vividly restores a forgotten author and her faded world, that of the 'strange pause' between the Romantics and the Victorians.

Miller crafts a fascinating narrative that is as much about the volatile ways in which gender intersects with cultural practices, including drug addiction, sexuality, colonialism, and creativity, as it is about her provocative subject, Letitia Elizabeth Landon.

Excellent... should become required reading.

An energetic, fascinating and deeply researched book… Miller’s skill is to address and capture the transient nature of Landon’s fame… to retrieve [Landon] from history’s doldrums, and demolish the mocking which continued for decades.

Terrific… Miller expertly decodes the story of her life and loves from poems, and the book reads like a novel.

Sensational material brought expertly to life; but Miller’s real gift to the reader is her patient reconstruction of the “lost literary generation” 1820s and 1830s.

A riveting, tantalisingly ambiguous portrait of a poet whose confessional voice makes her only more intriguing to modern readers.

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 Brontë 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.

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

The Bronte Myth

A fascinating and wonderfully readable deconstruction of the countless myths that have grown up around the Brontës.

A brilliant and riveting examination of the Bronte phenomenon

Written with wit and relish, and packed with irresistible detail

Literary history is seldom related with such a pleasant combination of brio and erudition

Crisply written and witty - Lucasta Miller sends the reader straight back to the wonderful novels that inspired such hommages

A sharp-witted study in literary reputation - Miller supplies a deft and immaculately detailed tracing of the many 'constructions' of Charlotte Bronte

Miller's unputdownable and erudite book has not only left us with a clear picture and greater understanding of the Brontes, but tells us a lot about ourselves too

A fascinating and wonderfully readable deconstruction of the countless myths that have grown up around the Brontës. 
 
Since 1857, hardly a year has gone by without some sort of Bronte 'biography' appearing. These range from pious accounts in Victorian conduct books to Freudian pyschobiographies, from plays, films and ballets to tourist brochures and images on tea-towels, from sensation-seeking penny-a-liners to meticulous works of sober scholarship. Each generation has rewritten the Brontes to reflect changing attitudes - towards the role of the woman writer, towards sexuality, towards the very concept of personality. 
 
The Bronte Myth gives vigorous new life to our understanding of the novelists and their culture and Lucasta Miller reveals as much about the impossible art of biography as she does about the Brontes themselves. 
 
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION FROM THE AUTHOR

Lucasta Miller

In lucid, graceful prose she [Miller] manages to bring us closer to the life and work of a poet who never seemed that far away... I didn't want this book to end.

Times Literary Supplement, *Books of the Year*

An enlightening and perceptive introduction to (or reminder of) the great Romantic poet's life and work.

Outstanding... [Miller's] knowledge of all things Keatsian is formidable... For newcomers to Keats, Miller's is the best short introduction I have come across.

Miller disrobes the myth, while helping us to appreciate what she calls Keats's "vertiginous originality". As a wittily perceptive introduction to (or reminder of) the poet and his work, her book is unlikely to be surpassed any time soon.

Lucasta Miller's task, which she carries out very successfully, is to strip away what we think when we think about Keats... This excellent book... enters an already crowded market of Keats biographies, but earns its place through its firm basis in precise reading. Miller is empathetic, and relishes Keats's best phrases.

Lucasta Miller's brilliant life of Keats, told through a close reading of "nine poems and one epitaph", reminds us more than once of the way in which Keats can deploy Shakespearean techniques to stop us in our readerly tracks. A timely and fresh re-appropriation of Keats... satisfying, engaging and accessible.

Excellent... [Keats] challenges us to make up our own minds about the self-styled 'chamelion poet'.

A readable guide to the poet's life.

Creates a vivid picture of Keats's writing process.

Thought-provoking… No single reading or assertion dominates the book…everything is treated with deep care and admirably intelligent judgement.

A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph

'Outstanding... The best short introduction I have come across' Sunday Times 
 
When he died at the age of just twenty-five, few imagined John Keats would one day be considered among the greatest poets of all time. 
 
Taking nine of Keats's best-known poems, Lucasta Miller excavates their backstories and, in doing so, resurrects the real Keats: an outsider from a damaged family whose visceral love of language allowed him to change the face of English literature for ever. 
 
Combining close-up readings with the story of his brief existence, Miller shows us how Keats crafted his groundbreaking poetry and explains why it continues to speak to us across the centuries. 
 
'One never wants Keats's life to end so soon; I didn't want this book to end, either' TLS Books of the Year 
 
'Irresistible... [Miller]digs into the backstories of her subject's most famous poems to uncover aspects of his life and work that challenge well-worn romantic myths' Wall Street Journal

Lucasta Miller

Praise for Keats

In lucid, graceful prose she [Miller] manages to bring us closer to the life and work of a poet who never seemed that far away... I didn't want this book to end.

An enlightening and perceptive introduction to (or reminder of) the great Romantic poet's life and work.

Outstanding... [Miller's] knowledge of all things Keatsian is formidable... For newcomers to Keats, Miller's is the best short introduction I have come across.

In lucid, graceful prose she [Miller] manages to bring us closer to the life and work of a poet who never seemed that far away... I didn't want this book to end.

An enlightening and perceptive introduction to (or reminder of) the great Romantic poet's life and work.

Outstanding... [Miller's] knowledge of all things Keatsian is formidable... For newcomers to Keats, Miller's is the best short introduction I have come across.

In lucid, graceful prose she [Miller] manages to bring us closer to the life and work of a poet who never seemed that far away... I didn't want this book to end.

An enlightening and perceptive introduction to (or reminder of) the great Romantic poet's life and work.

Outstanding... [Miller's] knowledge of all things Keatsian is formidable... For newcomers to Keats, Miller's is the best short introduction I have come across.

Books by Lucasta Miller

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