L.E.L.

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

By: Lucasta Miller

Narrated by: Elizabeth Jasicki

A lost 19th-century literary life, brilliantly rediscovered - Letitia Elizabeth Landon, hailed as the female Byron; she changed English poetry; her novels, short stories, and criticism, like Byron though in a woman's voice, explored the dark side of sexuality - by the acclaimed author of The Brontë Myth ("wonderfully entertaining...spellbinding" (New York Times Book Review); "ingenious" (The New Yorker).

"None among us dares to say / What none will choose to hear" (L.E.L., "Lines of Life")

Letitita Elizabeth Landon - pen name L.E.L. - dared to say it and made sure she was heard.

Hers was a life lived in a blaze of scandal and worship, one of the most famous women of her time, the Romantic Age in London's 1820s, her life and writing on the ascendency as Byron's came to an end.

Lucasta Miller tells the full story and recreates the literary London of her time. She was born in 1802 and was shaped by the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, a time of conservatism when values were in flux. She began publishing poetry in her teens and came to be known as a daring poet of thwarted romantic love. We see L.E.L. as an emblematic figure who embodied a seismic cultural shift, the missing link between the age of Byron and the creation of Victorianism. Miller writes of Jane Eyre as the direct connection to L.E.L. - its first-person confessional voice, its Gothic extremes, its love triangle, and in its emphasis on sadomasochistic romantic passion.

©2019 Lucasta Miller (P)2019 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"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." (Publishers Weekly)

"A riveting life of an English poet and novelist whose precocious career ended in sexual scandal and controversy.... The extent of Miller's research is impressive.... A thorough, engaging, and even loving restoration." (Kirkus, starred review)

"Lucasta Miller's stellar research blows two centuries of accumulated dust off a phenomenon worth knowing.... This book takes biography to a new level.... We see the network of manipulations, hypocrisy, commercial evil. Miller's investigation into the corroded promise of one young life opens up an abyss and, holding our gaze, speaks eloquently to the present." (Lyndall Gordon, New Statesman)

Infuriating, informative deep dive into the pre-Victorian literary scene

This book was fascinating. It introduces the mostly-forgotten poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and paints a fascinating portrait of the misogynist, honor-obsessed London literary scene. I don’t usually like non fiction but this one kept me hooked.