L.E.L. Read online

  ALSO BY LUCASTA MILLER

  The Brontë Myth

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2019 by Lucasta Miller

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Miller, Lucasta, author.

  Title: L.E.L. : the lost life and scandalous death of Letitia Elizabeth

  Landon, the celebrated “female Byron” / Lucasta Miller.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. | Includes

  bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018029621 (print) | LCCN 2018042545 (ebook) | ISBN

  9780525655350 (ebook) | ISBN 9780375412783 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: L.E.L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon), 1802–1838. | Poets,

  English—19th century—Biography.

  Classification: LCC PR4865.L5 (ebook) | LCC PR4865.L5 Z875 2019 (print) | DDC

  821/.7 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018029621

  Ebook ISBN 9780525655350

  Cover image: Portrait of L.E.L., after D. Maclise, engraved by J. Thompson. Fisher, Son & Co.

  Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

  v5.4

  ep

  For I, O, and O

  Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, the deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.

  —EDWARD ST AUBYN

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Lucasta Miller

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: The Tangled Web

  Chapter 2: The Three Magical Letters

  Chapter 3: Keeping Up Appearances

  Chapter 4: The Songbird and the Trainer

  Chapter 5: Fame

  Chapter 6: Shame

  Chapter 7: Lyre Liar

  Chapter 8: The Cash Nexus

  Chapter 9: French Connections

  Chapter 10: Vile Links

  Chapter 11: The Governor

  Chapter 12: Engagement

  Chapter 13: Heart of Darkness

  Chapter 14: Cover-Up

  Chapter 15: Hauntings

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  Illustrations

  Preface

  This book is about a poet who disappeared: about a woman who pursued her career in a blaze of publicity while leading a secret life that eventually destroyed her, and who left a such a legacy of lies and evasion that her true story can only now be told.

  Letitia Elizabeth Landon, who published under her initials, L.E.L., was feted as the female Byron during the 1820s. But after she was found dead in 1838, in West Africa of all places and in suspicious circumstances, the early Victorian publishing industry closed ranks to erase what they had come to see as her shameful history. Her literary reputation declined. She was left on the margins, surrounded by an aura of mystery and occlusion, her work routinely misunderstood.

  Over the past couple of decades, she has finally begun to attract more interest. Her work has begun to appear in anthologies of nineteenth-century verse and to be analyzed in scholarly articles. She has even begun to feature in a minor way on many university English literature syllabuses. At the same time, biographical researchers outside the mainstream academy have been collecting increasing documentation. Yet these disparate and uncoordinated efforts have still left a haunting vacuum where “Letitia Landon” ought to be.

  The process of uncovering her has proved both troublesome and troubling. Unlike some “marginal” figures, she was so famous in her lifetime that she is surrounded by a vast wealth of material, including numerous memoirs published by her contemporaries in the aftermath of her death. Such seemingly trustworthy sources, however, frequently turn out to be a tissue of equivocation, half-truths, and downright deceit. Even her own letters can on occasion be shown to tell lies. Often the only way to establish the forensic facts of her life is by recourse to public documents, such as censuses, parish records, and wills, though those, too, sometimes contain demonstrable falsehoods.

  Most challenging is the problem of interpreting her literary voice, whose unnerving qualities were, as this book will show, the direct result of the fact that it was impossible for her to speak openly. Obsessively circling around her absent “I,” her poetry gives away both more and less than it promises. To those who met her in the flesh she was a shape-shifter, who “did in truth resemble the disputed colour of the chameleon, changing its hues with the changeful lights around.” Critics lent her others’ names as if she had no identity of her own: she was the new Corinne or the English improvisatrice, the “female Byron,” or the “Sappho of a polished age.” Even her friends did not know whether to refer to her as Miss Landon or by her nom de plume L.E.L., using both interchangeably.

  What to call “Landon, or L.E.L.—whate’er thy name,” as one contemporary satirist put it, remains a problem. In this book, I have tried to use “L.E.L.” when referring to her works and “Letitia” when telling the story of her life. If I do not always stick to that rule, it is because she made the boundary between her different selves so tantalizingly ambiguous.

  Prologue

  Between eight and nine o’clock on the morning of Monday, October 15, 1838, the body of a thirty-six-year-old Englishwoman, wearing a lightweight dressing gown, was found on the floor of a room in Cape Coast Castle, West Africa. She was the new wife of the British governor, George Maclean, and had arrived there from England only eight weeks previously.

  Cape Coast Castle was the largest trading fort on the western coast of Africa: a stark white complex bristling with cannon, perched on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean in what is now Ghana. During the eighteenth century, it had been the “grand emporium” of the British slave trade. Countless captives had been held in its underground dungeons before being shipped to the Americas, while slave dealers did business in its precincts. Following the Abolition Act of 1807, the castle had remained under British command, its dungeons repurposed for housing local “prisoners.”

  A soldier in a sentry box stood at the entrance to the governor’s quarters, which were decorated in the European style: prints on the walls, a shining mahogany dining table, impressive table silver. The room in which the body was found, painted a deep blue, featured a toilet table and the deceased’s own portable desk, one of those small wooden boxes, typical of the period, that opened to form a sloping writing surface.

  Deaths from disease among Europeans in what was then known as the “white man’s grave” were not uncommon. Indeed, the fatality rate was so great that the local Methodist missionary was having difficulty recruiting volunteers. But this death was different. In the woman’s hand was a small empty bottle. Her eyes were open and abnormally dilated.

  The last person to see the governor’s wife alive was her maid, Emily Bailey, who had traveled out with her from England. She later testified that she had fou
nd Mrs. Maclean “well” when she went in to see her earlier that morning. On her return half an hour later, however, Emily Bailey had had difficulty opening the door. It had been blocked by her mistress’s body.

  Soon after Mrs. Bailey raised the alarm, the castle surgeon arrived. He attempted to revive the patient, but in vain. Garbled news soon spread to the nearby hills. Brodie Cruickshank, a young Scottish merchants’ agent, arrived at the fort within the hour, mistakenly supposing that it was the governor himself who had perished. In his memoir Eighteen Years on the Gold Coast of Africa, he later recalled his shock on entering the room where Mrs. Maclean’s body had been laid out on a bed. He had dined with the Macleans only the evening before, when she had appeared to be in “perfect health.” The governor himself was in the room. He had slid down into a chair and was silently staring into space, his face “crushed.”

  Later that very day, an inquest was held at the castle, the jury hastily convened from among the local merchant community. No autopsy was performed, but the empty bottle was produced in evidence and its label carefully transcribed: “Acid Hydrocianicum Delatum, Pharm. Lond. 1836, Medium Dose Five Minims, being about one-third the strength of that in former use, prepared by Scheele’s proof.” The deceased was said to have been in the habit of using the contents, prussic acid in everyday parlance, for medicinal reasons, and to have taken too much by mistake. A verdict of accidental death was recorded.

  After the inquest, the corpse was hastily interred under the parade ground. During the burial, a tropical shower burst from the sky in such torrents that a tarpaulin had to be erected over the gravediggers. By the time the final paving stone was replaced it had grown dark. The workmen finished the job by torchlight.

  West Africa was so remote from England that it was not until the morning of January 1, 1839, that a discreet death notice appeared in The Times:

  At Cape Coast Castle, Africa, on Monday, the 15th of October last, suddenly, Mrs. L.E. Maclean, wife of George Maclean Esq., Governor of Cape Coast Castle.

  But after the evening Courier revealed the woman’s maiden name later that day, the story became headline news. She was one of the most famous writers in England: Letitia Elizabeth Landon, better known by her initials, “L.E.L.”

  CHAPTER 1

  The Tangled Web

  Although she remains little heard of today outside specialist circles, L.E.L. was a “legendary figure” in her own time. According to a critic writing in 1841, her name was “so identified with the literature of the day, that not to know anything of it is scarcely possible.” Elizabeth Barrett (who later added Browning to her name following her marriage) believed her unrivaled among women poets for her “raw bare powers.” In America, Edgar Allan Poe thought her “genius” so self-evident that it was “almost unnecessary to speak” of it. In Europe, she was admired by Goethe’s family, Heinrich Heine, and the influential Parisian Revue des deux mondes. Closer to home, her poetry was devoured by the young Brontës in provincial Yorkshire.

  L.E.L. was, however, the voice of a lost literary generation. Her career, which spanned the 1820s and 1830s, coincided exactly with the “strange pause,” as the historian G. M. Young called it, between the Romantics and the Victorians. Modern scholars are still unsure exactly what happened during this troublesome transition phase between the deaths of Keats, Shelley, and Byron and the rise of Dickens. Referred to as “an embarrassment to the historian of English literature” and an “indeterminate borderland,” it resists periodization, and has never been dignified with a name. However, it should probably be called the “post-Byronic” era, since the fallout from Byron’s celebrity cult had such a profound impact on the writing of the day. Following his death in 1824, every hack wanted his—or her—own cult of personality. Yet the labile, often ironized voices writers created in response remain hard to interpret, their tone difficult for the modern reader to pin down. None is harder to read than that of the inscrutable L.E.L.

  No one knew who she was when she first began to publish under her mysterious initials in the early 1820s. But in 1824 she emerged in public as the star author of a new best seller, The Improvisatrice. A skillful improviser of her own image, she soon became a celebrity, her portrait exhibited at the Royal Academy, her presence a fixture on the London social scene.

  If she was the female Byron, “female” was the operative word. She was the “poetess” par excellence in a period in which, unusually in literary history, women dominated the genre. The eighteenth-century cult of sensibility, regarded by some modern cultural historians as the fons et origo of English Romanticism, had already produced some notable female poets, including Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson, Letitia Landon’s literary foremothers. Following the untimely deaths of Keats, Shelley, and Byron, the “poetess” became culturally supreme. Not just in England, but in France, Germany, Russia, and America, a new generation of women Romantics staked their careers on the supposition that their gender made them more sensitive and intuitive than men, and thus more poetical.

  All the poetesses made capital out of the emotions, but Landon’s work struck its own peculiar chord. Her main English rival, Felicia Hemans, focused on the “domestic affections” and the moral value of altruism and empathy. But Letitia Landon’s favorite topic was thwarted romantic love. “I have sung passionate songs of beating hearts,” she wrote, summing up her feminine sensibility in the slogan “the fallen leaf, the faded flower, the broken heart, and the early grave.” In the view of Germaine Greer, writing in 1995, “No female poet before L.E.L. had ever written of women’s passion as she did. It was not like the love plaints of men, but the fierce, impotent, inward-turning tumult of a woman’s heart, the agony of a creature unable to speak or act, forced to wreak her vengeance on herself.” The passion in the work was always unrequited, always doomed, and invariably expressed in the first person. Whether the “I” of the poetry reflected Letitia Landon’s own true feelings remains to this day the ultimate crux of her legacy.

  Later nineteenth-century women poets, such as Emily Dickinson, Emily Brontë, and Christina Rossetti, dressed like nuns and shunned society. But L.E.L. danced until the early hours and favored risqué décolletages in pink satin, scarlet cashmere, or black velvet. Contemporaries were startled by the contrast between the emotional extremism of her poetry and her society persona as a sardonic, glittering wit, a Dorothy Parker avant la lettre.

  Behind the scenes she was an indefatigable worker, preternaturally productive in her bid to fill the public’s emotional void with her literary lamentations. Her oeuvre is so vast that it is yet to be fully cataloged. By the time she died at thirty-six, she had published six stand-alone poetry collections, three novels, and a book of short stories, plus at least ten further poetry collections in the then fashionable format of the “annual.” That, however, made up only a portion of an output that also included reams of occasional verses, prose fictions, and critical writings, plus an unknown number of unsigned reviews. A tragedy and a further novel were published posthumously.

  No writer of Letitia Landon’s generation achieved wider currency in terms of sheer word count or name recognition. Given her lifetime fame, her subsequent disappearance from standard literary histories, even if only as a name, remains a conundrum. But that is not the only puzzle surrounding her. From the moment her death was announced in early 1839, it was clouded by an aura of mystery and mistrust, which grew and mutated as the story spread.

  Some early reports erroneously stated that she had died in Africa of a tropical disease, including the story that appeared on the front page of the Brontës’ local paper, the Leeds Mercury, on January 5, 1839, under the capitalized banner “DEATH OF LEL.” However, the provincial press was slow off the mark. News of the prussic acid bottle was already in circulation, thanks in the first instance to Cape Coast’s resident minister, the Reverend Thomas Freeman, who had sent an on-the-spot account to the Methodist paper The Watchman. It was only because Fr
eeman feared that news of yet another European casualty would put off potential missionaries that he wanted it on record that Letitia Landon’s death was “not occasioned by any sickness peculiar to this climate (her general health having been very good from the day she landed until yesterday morning, when she was found dead in her room, lying close to the door, having in her hand a bottle which had contained prussic acid, a portion of which she had taken,…the remainder being spilt on the floor).” In that parenthesis, the minister caused a sensation.

  The verdict of accidental death failed to convince. On January 10, The Times put into print the obvious inference that had been doing the rounds for the best part of a week: that the “poor lady” must have been so “very wretched” that she had “destroyed herself.” However, Letitia Landon’s friends disagreed. They could, they said, find nothing in her cheerful and healthful letters home to indicate that she had been suicidal. Her correspondence from Africa showed her praising the delicious pineapples and making plans for future publications. The letter found on her writing desk on the very morning she died was upbeat in tone. “I must say, in itself, the place is infinitely superior to all I ever dreamed of,” she told her correspondent, Marie Fagan. “The castle is a fine building—the rooms excellent. I do not suffer from heat; insects there are few, or none; and I am in excellent health.”

  Suspicions yet darker than suicide were already taking shape. As early as January 3, the Morning Post first floated the possibility that L.E.L. might have been murdered. Distrust was further aroused when her London doctor went into print to question how she could have had access to so dangerous a substance as prussic acid: there had been none in the traveling medical chest he had supplied. The hurried inquest and absence of an autopsy further aroused suspicion. Some surmised that Mrs. Maclean had in fact been killed by some unnamed indigenous poison, in whose mysteries the natives were said to be adept.