L.E.L. Read online

  As Byromania burgeoned, his private life became the stuff of theater, with high society agog at his tempestuous amour with Lady Caroline Lamb, and then fascinated when he married the puritanical Annabella Milbanke. Such gossip fueled the commercial poetry boom. In 1816, Byron’s Irish friend Thomas Moore secured an exorbitant £3,000 for his orientalist fantasia Lalla Rookh. But that year, Byron’s celebrity turned to notoriety when he split from his recently married wife and fled to the Continent, amid rumors he had committed incest with his half sister. In the wake of the scandal, a rift opened up between the mainstream and the counterculture.

  Byron cemented his new outsider status by throwing in his lot with Percy Bysshe Shelley, then a little-known figure on the fringes. A champion of free love, atheism, and revolution, the upper-class renegade Shelley had succeeded in shocking even the anarchist philosopher William Godwin, godfather of the 1790s radical movement. Having cultivated his support, not least by offering the cash-strapped guru helpful loans, Shelley horrified him by eloping with his fifteen-year-old daughter, Mary. Not to be outdone, Mary’s stepsister Claire inveigled herself into Byron’s bed.

  Together, the rebel cohort sought a “paradise of exiles,” as Shelley called it, first in Switzerland, and then in Italy. Abroad, at bay, and out to shock, Byron grew ever more provocative with his sexual and political satire Don Juan, which was published in installments. Its political liberalism and sexual libertarianism generated outrage back in England. Hostility increased toward “the Godwinian colony, that play ‘the Bacchanal beside the Tuscan sea.’ ”

  Anxiety that permissiveness would undermine the nation’s stability had been brewing for a long time. In the wake of the French Revolution of 1789, many believed that unless the lid was kept on human passions, violence and anarchy would result. In 1802, the Society for the Suppression of Vice was set up in England to police public morals. Even Shakespeare came to seem in need of expurgation. Bowdler obliged in 1807.

  British victory over the French at Waterloo was followed by an economic crisis that only intensified fears of insurrection at home. In the Peterloo Massacre of August 1819, the army was ordered to attack a crowd of democracy demonstrators. The climate of political repression was matched by increasing sexual squeamishness. By October 1819, even the exiled Byron was feeling constrained. “I had such projects for the Don—but the Cant is so much stronger than Cunt—now a days,—that the benefit of experience in a man who had well weighed the worth of both monosyllables—must be lost to despairing posterity,” he complained.

  “Cant,” a term much bandied about during the 1820s, is a key concept for understanding Letitia Landon. It is etymologically derived from the Latin cantare, to sing, and one theory of its ancient origins points to lackadaisical monks going through the motions, chanting Latin services without understanding or caring what the words meant. In the nineteenth century it was usually used pejoratively to signify hypocrisy or affected moralism covering unpalatable truths. Yet “cant” also had the sense, as in “thieves’ cant,” of an underground jargon designed to exclude outsiders. The “songs” L.E.L. sang—she rarely used the word “poem”—played on the idea of secret messages that only the initiate could understand.

  The six months leading up to L.E.L.’s first appearance in the Literary Gazette saw Byron and Shelley under increasing attack. In March 1821, the poet laureate Robert Southey, once a youthful revolutionary but now a conservative, struck out at their “lascivious” works. He saw them as elevating a libertine lifestyle into a philosophy that struck at the heart of civil society and its building block, the family. In his view, they were “men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations, who, forming a system of opinions to suit their own unhappy course of conduct, have rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society, and…labour to make others as miserable as themselves by infecting them with a moral virus that eats into the soul!” He called them “the Satanic school.”

  Southey intended the label as a throwaway insult. But it was adopted by youthful rebels as a badge of pride. “Satanic mania” raged among “young gentlemen without neckcloths,” who swaggered around “playing the Corsair and boasting that they were villains,” their open-necked shirts a tribal statement of rebellion. It was among them that L.E.L. found her first fans.

  The moral panic intensified in May 1821, with the appearance of a pirated edition of Shelley’s poem Queen Mab, a mystical paean to free love, which eventually led to the imprisonment of its publisher after a successful prosecution by the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Then, in July, Shelley struck back with Adonais, an elegy for the “Cockney” poet Keats, who had died in February in Rome. Shelley accused the conservative press of having hounded Keats to death by mocking his sensual, pagan, antiestablishment poetry as vulgar and uneducated.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley, painted by Amelia Curran in 1819. The open-necked shirt was a symbol of youthful rebellion.

  Editorially, the Literary Gazette paid lip service to the values of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Its review of Queen Mab, published in May 1821, expressed “sorrow, indignation and loathing” at the “abominable and infamous contagion” being spread by Shelley, in whom “one of the darkest of fiends” had “clothed himself in a human body.” Shelley was, the paper could reveal, a “debaucher” who had thrust “an unfortunate wife and mother into ruin, prostitution, guilt and suicide.” This was one of the first references in print to Shelley’s first wife, Harriet, whom he had left for Mary Godwin, and who had indeed gone on to drown herself in 1816.

  It was only as a warning, thundered the Gazette, that it felt duty-bound to “lay before our readers the examples of his poetry.” Such a preamble allowed the editor to quote large chunks from the offending text in a lead review spread over eleven columns—thus giving readers the forbidden content they craved.

  The front page of the Literary Gazette looked like this. On May 19, 1821, shown here, the lead review lambasted Shelley’s free love manifesto Queen Mab on moral grounds, but provided extensive quotations from the forbidden text. “We have doubted whether we ought to notice this book at all; and if our silence could have prevented its being disseminated, no allusion to it should ever have stained the Literary Gazette,” announced the editor hypocritically.

  The Gazette’s review of Adonais, published on December 8, continued in the same vein, although the lower-middle-class Keats was treated more patronizingly than the upper-class rebel Shelley. Keats was dismissed as a “foolish young man” who had written some indecent verses in the hope of making some cash, and had caught cold and died because he refused to wear that “anti-poetical…encumbrance,” a neckcloth.

  John Keats on his deathbed, 1821, drawn in Rome by his friend Joseph Severn. L.E.L.’s poetry column surreptitiously channeled Keats’s influence, while the Gazette’s editorials outwardly mocked him as a “foolish young man.”

  Some readers probably took the Gazette’s editorial cant at face value. But after L.E.L. began to appear in the autumn of 1821, others could see that its new poetess was furtively spreading the virus. In a discreet homage to Shelley’s lament, and to Keats himself, she offered a “Requiem” to an unnamed, outcast poet, whose “daystar was even in dawning o’ercast.” On January 19, 1822, she again lamented the loss of her Keatsian “bright star,” quoting from his now famous sonnet. A week later, she continued the theme with a threnody for an unnamed poet driven to death by the “cold mockery” of critics. It was written in a style so unmistakably Keatsian that aficionados could not have failed to recognize it as such:

  Sweet Poesy!

  How witching is thy power upon the heart;

  Enchantment that doth bind our senses up

  In one unutterable influence.

  By admitting that her own “influences” could not outwardly be “uttered,” L.E.L.—whose initials had their own echo of “hell”—was slyly positio
ning herself as the first female poet of the Satanic school.

  L.E.L. could mimic Keats’s style, but she was, to use his phrase, a “cameleon [sic] poet” whose “poetical Character” had “no character” and “no self” and was “every thing and nothing.” Her voice changed with the wind like an Aeolian lyre, Shelley’s image for the poet. Her first Gazette contribution to hint that she was young and female was a series of “Six Songs” that offered such a baffling range of subject positions that readers were left in a state of heightened uncertainty.

  The opening lyric was written in the Byronic style. In it, the speaker altruistically offered to share life’s burdens with her beloved, but the final lines were suspiciously open-ended:

  I shall not shrink, or fear to share

  The darkest fate if it be thine!

  It was up to the reader to decide which sins L.E.L. was prepared to commit for love. Anything from adultery to a suicide pact was possible.

  A further lyric was a love spell purportedly written in the voice of a simple young girl innocently yearning for a romantic relationship, her supposed sexual purity symbolized by a wreath of white roses:

  Oh! come to my slumber

  Sweet dreams of my love,

  I have hung the charm’d wreath

  My soft pillow above.

  The roses are linked

  In a chain pure and white;

  And the rose-leaves are wet

  With the dew drops of night.

  Readers of Keats would, however, have recognized in the verses an allusion to his unabashedly sensual “The Eve of St. Agnes,” which was regarded as “unfit for ladies,” since the heroine’s dreams become a reality when a flesh-and-blood lover enters her room and brings her to orgasm in her sleep.

  L.E.L.’s next poem was provocatively titled “Truth,” as if inviting readers to search out its true meaning. It spoke a language of flowers and birds that only the willfully blind could have failed to spot as sexual metaphors. L.E.L. imagined spending the night on a “leafy couch” in an island paradise with a lover while the “bulbul” sang their serenade.

  The pastoral-erotic style was borrowed from the Italianate “Della Cruscan” school of English poetry. Fingered by Blackwood’s Magazine in 1821 as the common ancestor of Keats, Shelley, and Byron, it had initially flourished in the 1790s in the hands of the scandalous actress/courtesan turned poet Mary Robinson, among others. Thomas Moore’s early Della Cruscan collection, The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little Esq., was considered so obscene by Coleridge that, he exclaimed, “my heart sickens, at the very thought of seeing such books in the hands of a child of mine.”

  Blackwood’s called the original Della Cruscans merely “foolish and profligate,” but claimed, in a frenzy of manufactured outrage, that the new generation was offering “fiend like insult to feeling moral ties and Christian principle” and courting “reprobate popularity by raising the banner to all the vicious of the community.” L.E.L.’s Della Cruscan detour ended on a note of jeering bathos which suggested that she was already sexually jaded:

  I thought thus of the flowers, the moon

  The faery isle for you and me;

  And then I thought how very soon

  How very tired we would be.

  Her last “Song” in the series was a jangling joke about marrying for money:

  He must be rich whom I could love,

  His fortune clear must be,

  Whether in land or in the funds,

  ’Tis all the same to me.

  It could have been taken as safe comedy in the Jane Austen mold, a dig at husband-hunting girls. But with its near-blasphemous title, “Matrimonial Creed,” it was also a Shelleyan attack on the institution of marriage as legal prostitution.

  Traditionally, L.E.L. has been ranked with Felicia Hemans as a sentimental proponent of emotional sincerity as a conventional moral force. However, her twisted early lyrics have much more in common with those written by her great German contemporary Heinrich Heine at the same date, described by a recent critic as a “combination of willed naïveté, extravagant sentiment, and jeering irony” that “suggest a persona in which the self has thinned out to a kind of linguistic diagram, a raggle-taggle bunch of clichés strung together by a self-consciousness that can neither accept nor exclude them.”

  Heine, whom Letitia Landon later met in Paris, created his famously equivocal voice in response to the post-Napoleonic repression of the Metternich regime. He used poetic ambivalence, and the overt topic of romantic love, to register covert political resistance. The idea of the radical libertine, a commonplace of the eighteenth century, went underground after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. All over Europe, the 1820s and 1830s saw the avant-garde retreat from public life. Artists relocated their disappointed revolutionary instincts in the world of the private, rebel emotions, from Stendhal’s cold, clinical analysis of love’s psychopathology in De l’amour, to the virulent bittersweet of Schubert’s Winterreise, to the ironies of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.

  L.E.L. shared her male contemporaries’ refusenik embrace of the discourse of romantic love. But because of her gender, she was placed in a much more complex and compromised situation. The slipperiness of her poetic identity, in terms of style, voice, and viewpoint, reflected a fundamental reality: that as a woman, her subjectivity and autonomy were under constant threat.

  Although the British poetic counterculture was politically liberal, Byron and Shelley had cordoned off poetry as a male-only genre. The women they attracted were undoubtedly sexually daring. But if they published, they did so in the lesser medium of prose, as in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Caroline Lamb’s kiss-and-tell attack on her former lover Byron, Glenarvon (1816). The Satanic poetess was a contradiction in terms.

  L.E.L. attempted to square the circle by giving a voice—or indeed voices—to the Satanic muse. She soon buried the sardonic abrasions of “Six Songs” and shifted grammatically from the first to the third person. Next up was a series of narrative “poetic sketches,” which showcased, but did not embody, a lineup of tragic, lovelorn heroines drowning in an operatic welter of conspicuously “feminine” emotion: a “Maniac” girning like some-latter day Ophelia for her lost Keatsian “bright star”; a Byronic corsair’s discarded mistress, whose shade haunts a sexually symbolic cavern; a jilted princess who dons male attire to stalk her fickle lover, as Lady Caroline Lamb had done in real life after Byron forsook her.

  L.E.L.’s heroines did not all “die virgins,” as was assumed in the 1990s. They were in fact typically portrayed bemoaning their “sweet ruin” at the hands of some Satanic seducer, like the “woman wailing for her demon lover” in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” If Byron was commonly dubbed a fallen angel, L.E.L. embraced the proverbial figure of the “fallen woman” as his doppelgänger and covert competitor.

  In doing so, she identified herself with a specifically female tradition: that of the legendary Greek poetess Sappho, who was literally a fallen woman, as she was said to have thrown herself to her death from a cliff into the sea as a result of her unhappy love affair with the ferryman Phaon. (Although now associated with lesbian love, Sappho was then primarily regarded as an emblem of heterosexual passion.)

  The scandalous actress Mary Robinson, who had died in 1800, had been called the “English Sappho” after publishing her sonnet sequence Sappho and Phaon in 1796. L.E.L. was clearly suing for the title herself. But rather than focusing on Sappho’s private love agonies, as would have been the convention, she portrayed the Greek poetess performing before a massed crowd in a stadium:

  She leant upon her harp, and thousands looked

  On her in love and wonder—thousands knelt

  And worshipp’d in her presence—burning tears,

  And words that died in utterance, and a pause

  Of breathless agitated eage
rness,

  First gave the full heart’s homage: then came forth

  A shout that rose to heaven, and the hills.

  This unusual gesture was a subliminal invitation to readers to project the magic of fame onto the unseen L.E.L. herself. The syntactical ambiguity as to whose tears, whose shout we are witnessing—Sappho’s or the crowd’s—exposes her perception of literary identity not as a fixed entity but as a co-creation between the poet’s imagination and the reader’s fantasy.

  L.E.L. often borrowed gothic motifs. In one grisly yet perfectly symmetrical lyric, slimy earthworms slither among discolored bones. But her true debt to gothic was the way in which she transposed its techniques of reader manipulation to the new phenomenon of the weekly poetry column. Long before Dickens discovered the formula for serial fiction, she worked out how to keep her readers reading: by keeping them in a heightened state of permanent arousal like the “bold lover” on Keats’s Grecian urn, who can “never, never…kiss,” though “winning near the goal.” The desire to penetrate her subtexts became a metaphor for sex itself.

  The ultimate question that reverberated around the Cambridge Union was more salacious than Bulwer let on in retrospect: Was the real woman behind the veil a virgin, or was she a devotee of Shelley’s fatal free love cult? The issue became a topic of euphemistic dispute in the columns of the Gazette itself. The anonymous “A.H.R.” asserted that she must be writing from sexual experience: “Truly it has been thine to feel love’s power on thee.” But another contributor, “W.L.R.,” was convinced that she was still pure and unsullied: “Long may the sorrows of thy song / Be in thy guileless heart unknown.”