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JE,Itia {)Izabeth ~Ndon (1802-1838)

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JE,Itia {)Izabeth ~Ndon (1802-1838) JE,itia {)izabeth ~ndon (1802-1838) Letitia Elizabeth Landon was born on 14 August 1802 at No. 25 Hans Place, Chelsea, the eldest child of Catherine Jane Bishop and John Landon. At age six she became a day student at a school run by the future Countess St. Quentin, a poet. Caroline Lamb and Mary Russell Mitford both had studied there. The young Letitia Landon acquired from her schoolmistress a love of poetry and from her French instructor, Count St. Quentin, a flawless French accent. When Letitia was seven years old her family moved to Trevor Park, East Barnet, where Elizabeth Landon, a cousin, taught Letitia history, geography, grammar, and literature. Novels were forbidden, but Letitia read them clan­ destinely. She also read history and travel literature and had a tutor for French and music. Her favorite author was Walter Scott, and one of her favorite works was Homer's Odyssey. In later life she recalled, "I cannot remember the time when composition in some shape or other was not a habit. I used to invent long stories, which I was only too glad if I could get my mother to hear. These soon took a metrical form; and I used to walk about the grounds, and lie awake half the night, reciting my verses aloud." 1 In 1814, when Letitia was thirteen, the hitherto affluent family suffered severe financial difficulties, bringing about a move to Lewis Place, Fulham, and then, after a year, to Old Brampton. Her days of formal schooling were over, but she continued her writing and voracious reading. One day ·her mother asked William Jerdan, a neighbor and editor of the Literary Gazette, to read some of Letitia's work. Jerdan, suspecting that the elder Landon was the author, offered comments and suggestions. Not long afterwards, he ac­ cepted one of Letitia's short pieces, "Rome," for the 11 March 1818 issue of the Gazette. She signed it "L." The following issue contained her poem "The I . Quoted in Samuel Carter Hall, A Book ef Memories ef Great Men and Women ef the Age, from Personal Acquaintance, 2nd ed. (London, 1877), 269. Letitia Elizabeth Landon Michaelmas Daisy." Soon Landon's poetry began to appear often in the pages of the Gazette, and she began to think about using her writing to help support her family. By 1820 Landon was working on a long poem, "The Fate of Adelaide." Sarah Siddons, the distinguished actress and a friend of Landon's grand­ mother's, helped Landon in August 1821 to publish The Fate of Adelaide, a Swiss Romantic Tale; and Other Poems. Dedicated to Siddons, the book sold well, but its publisher, John Warren, failed, and Landon earned no money for her work. By this time, however, Jerdan had become her mentor. Be­ ginning in the summer of 1821, under the initials "L.E.L.," she published a series of "Poetical Sketches" that Jerdan had commissioned from her. Within months her poems became the rage. In 1831 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, writ­ ing for the New Monthly Magazine, recalled that at college "there was always in the reading-room of the Union a rush every Saturday afternoon for the 'Literary Gazette,' and an impatient anxiety to hasten at once to the corner of the sheet which contained the three magical letters 'L.E.L.' And all of us praised the verse, and all of us guessed at the author. We soon learned it was a female, and our admiration was doubled, and our conjectures tripled. Was she young? Was she pretty? And .. was she rich?" 2 When Jerdan revealed that the author was a "young lady yet in her teens,'' scores of young men promptly fell in love with her. The Quaker poet Bernard Barton in February 1822 published an admiring apostrophe to L.E.L., closing with the lines, I know not who, or what, thou art, Nor do I seek to know thee, While Thou, performing thus thy part, Such banquets canst bestow me. Then be, as long as thou shalt list, My viewless, nameless melodist.3 Landon's initials became her name. But her literary popularity had so far been of little value financially, so in July 1824, under the title The Improvisa­ trice; and Other Poems, she published with Hurst and Robinson a collection of her "Poetical Sketches" from the Literary Gazette. The manuscript had been rejected by Murray, Longmans, and Colburn, as well as by several other pub­ lishers, but the volume turned out to be a smashing success, going through six editions the first year and earning L.E.L. three hundred pounds. The Gentle­ man's Magazine declared, "We have seldom seen a voice more conspicuous for vivid imagination, felicity of diction, vigorous condensation oflanguage, and 2. Laman Blanchard, Life and Literary Remains of L.E.L., 2 vols. (Philadelphia, r84r), r :32. 3. London Literary Gazette, 9 February r822, 89. Letitia Elizabeth Landon passion-intensity of sentiment." And the Ladies' Monthly Museum observed, "The authoress displays a cultivated genius, which will enable her to attain a distinguished place among the British votaries of the Muses." 4 Landon's poetic reputation was now established. Landon's good business sense led her to capitalize on her new-found fame, and she quickly brought out another volume, entitled The Troubadour; Cata­ logue of Pictures, and Historical Sketches, in July 1825. It earned her six hundred pounds. In December 1826 she published a sequel entitled The Golden Vio­ let, with its Tales of Romance and Chivalry; and Other Poems, which contained "Erinna," a poem whose object she said was to "trace the progress of a mind highly-gifted, well-rewarded, but finding the fame it won a sting and a sor­ row, and finally sinking beneath the shadows of success." Though expensive, this volume also sold well. Critics complained that her poetry was monoto­ nous, so in her next book, published in October 1829, The Venetian Bracelet, The Lost Pleiad, a History of the Lyre, and Other Poems, she sought a remedy in greater social consciousness, a deeper psychological perspective, and a stronger sense of the dramatic. She portrayed love as linked to misery and death and life itself as a mockery. Increasingly, Landon came to know the lia­ bilities of being a woman with literary talent. She told a friend, "Did we not know this world to be but a place of trial-our bitter probation for another and for a better-how strange in its severity would seem the lot of genius in a woman. The keen feeling-the generous enthusiasm-the lofty aspiration­ and the delicate perception - are given but to make the possessor unfitted for her actual position." 5 After the death of her father, Landon's family depended upon her as its sole financial support. She continued to write regularly for the Literary Gazette, not only signed poetry but unsigned critical reviews. She had been contrib­ uting in a major way to most of the literary gift books and annuals, almost since their inception, but in 1831 she took over the editorship of Fisher's Drawing-Room Scrap-Book, a handsome annual published in quarto containing more than thirty poems to illustrate an equal number of fine, steel-plate en­ gravings. She continued as editor, contributing all of the verse not otherwise ascribed, until her departure from England in 1838. Her early biographer, Laman Blanchard, says that Landon wrote so quickly that "it would take her just as long to copy, as to compose" her poems.6 4. Gentleman's Magazine 94 (July 1824): 61-63; and Ladies' Monthly Museum, n.s., 20 (1824): 106. 5. Quoted in Blanchard, Life and Literary Remains, r :215. 6. Ibid., 40. Letitia Elizabeth Landon In 1832, in addition to contributing to the annuals and to the New Monthly Magazine and editing the Drawing-Room Scrap-Book, she wrote all of the copy for The Easter Gift, a Religious Offering for 1833 and for Heath's Book ef Beauty for 1833. Her female literary friends came to include Emma Roberts, Maria Jane Jews bury, Mary Russell Mitford, Agnes Strickland, Jane Porter, and Anna Maria Hall. Hall encouraged her to write a novel, and Romance and Reality was the result, begun in 1830 and published the following year. Landon said that "writing poetry is like writing one's native language, and writing prose, writing in a strange tongue.'' 7 Nevertheless, her novel Francesca Carrara (1834) brought praise from the critics and established her as a writer of romantic fiction. Landon's success also inspired gossip and rumor, fed by her habit of pub­ licly calling male friends such as William Jerdan and the Irish artist David Maclise by their first names and receiving them alone in private. She was said to be romantically involved with William Maginn, a journalist with a jeal­ ous wife and four children. Landon lamented, "I have long since discovered that I must be prepared for enmity I have never provoked, and unkindness I have little deserved. God knows that if, when I do go into society, I meet with more homage and attention than most, it is dearly bought. What is my life? One day of drudgery after another; ... envy, malice, and all unchari­ tableness, -these are the fruits of a successful literary career for a woman." 8 Feigning indifference, she refused publicly to respond to the accusations. But privately she yearned "for oblivion, and five hundred a year!" 9 In 1834 rumors circulated that Landon, then thirty-two, was engaged to marry John Forster, the twenty-three-year-old editor of the Daily News who was to become Dickens's biographer.
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