Love As a Commodity: Letitia Elizabeth Landon and “Sappho”

Love as a Commodity: Letitia Elizabeth Landon and “Sappho”

Masae Kawatsu

Synopsis The legendary leap of Sappho because of unrequited love for Phaon has inspired various fi ctional accounts from ancient times to the present. In this essay, I consider the early nineteenth-century fi ction of Sappho through a focus upon the poems of Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Landon, who achieved commercial success in the 1820s and 1830s, was presented as the “English Sappho” by William Jerdan, the editor of the Literary Gazette and Landon’s publisher. Moreover, he was the father of Landon’s three illegitimate children and their relationship lasted from 1822 to at least 1834. Although the rumor concerning these two individuals circulated in 1826, Landon publicly denied the relationship during her lifetime, and it was not until Cynthia Lawford discovered hard evidence in 2000 that the affair turned out to be true. I pay attention therefore to the way Landon weaved her affair with the married editor twenty years her senior into her story of Sappho in “Sappho” (1822) and “Sappho’s Song” in The Improvisatrice (1824), which were published before the rumor began. Transforming her real passion to fi c- tional passion, Landon creates a Sappho who is, unlike Ovid’s, always heterosexual and modest, therefore blameless, and who always laments the loss of love, considering love more important than fame. No doubt Landon knew that her Sappho conformed to the time’s tastes. Even after the rumor, Landon kept publishing many poems on the same theme of unrequited love and death in her volumes and literary annuals. Thus she succeeded in turning her own and Sappho’s love into a commodity to satisfy readers’ demands.

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[ 133 ] 134 Masae Kawatsu

English Sappho Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–38), known to her public by the initials “L. E. L.,” was the “English Sappho” of her time. The Literary Gazette fi rst conferred the title on her in a review of her second volume The Improvisatrice and Other Poems (1824) (389 [3 July 1824]: 417).1 The anonymous reviewer is presumed to be William Jerdan, Landon’s neigh- bor and publisher, and the editor of the Literary Gazette notorious for “puffi ng” the publishers’ leading authors.2 Moreover, he was the father of Landon’s three illegitimate children, and their relationship lasted from 1822 to at least 1834. Although a rumor concerning these two individuals circulated in 1826, Landon publicly and privately denied the relationship during her lifetime. It was not until Cynthia Lawford discovered solid evidence in 2000 that the existence of the affair was proved (“Diary”). Since Stuart Curran’s 1988 reevaluation of Landon’s poetry, critics have tended to consider the feelings of love and sorrow of her female characters to be products of Landon’s fertile imagination and not derived from her personal experience (Armstrong; Greer; Stephenson). Some re- jected the likelihood of a physical relationship between Landon and Jerdan (Greer 292; Mellor 122). Lawford’s 2000 discovery caused this reading to be reexamined. In her 2003 essay, Lawford herself persuasively indicated that much of the passion in Landon’s poems “was directed toward Jerdan” (“Thou” 3). However, such an autobiographical reading alone would not suffi ce to give an adequate explanation for Landon’s commercial success in the 1820s and 1830s. In order to explore this factor of her commercial success, in this paper, I focus on the way Landon wove her affair with the married editor twenty years her senior into her fi ction of Sappho in “Sappho” (1822) and “Sappho’s Song,” a short poem contained in The Improvisatrice (1824), both published before the rumor began.

The Reception of Sappho’s Leap The story of Sappho taking a fatal leap from the rocks of Leucas into the sea because of unrequited love for Phaon had come down from Menander’s comedy through Ovid’s epistle “Sappho to Phaon.” Alexander Pope’s translation of Ovid’s poetry in 1712 contributed to making the image of the Ovidian Sappho widely known. But it was Joseph Addison’s academic Love as a Commodity 135 or pseudo-academic articles in the Spectator, Nos. 223, 227, and 233 in 1711 that popularized Sappho’s leap throughout Britain. Addison uses the French philosopher Pierre Bayle as his authority for saying that the place of Leucas was called “Lovers-Leap” since despairing lovers leaped from there for “the Cure” to stop the pains of lost love, and that Sappho was one of the leapers (Joseph Addison 2: 366, 2: 408–09; Bayle 3: 1922n(B)). Addison as well as Bayle also remarks that Sappho did not commit suicide but took a dangerous leap fearlessly with the expectation of survival. As time went by, ideas about Sappho’s leap had changed. Whereas John Addison, an English translator of Sappho’s poetry in 1735, followed the view of Joseph Addison that Sappho was heterosexual and leaped to cure her heartbreak (John Addison 253), William King added notes to his 1736 edition of The Toast that Sappho was “a famous Tribade,” which tarnished her reputation as the “Tenth Muse,” and that as a pun- ishment for her homosexuality she “killed herself at last for the Love of a Man” (110n). As far as I know, King’s text was the earliest that presumed Sappho’s leap to be for the sake of suicide. In late eighteenth century, English translators of Sappho also depicted her leap as suicide. But unlike King, they admired the heterosexual Sappho’s “masculine” ability in composing poetry and her “masculine” suicide leap. In 1768, for instance, E. B. Greene distinguished clearly between other lovesick women who “peaceably” dispatched themselves “by the noose, or the river” (133) and the masculine Sappho who killed herself by leaping into the sea from a precipice which was a much higher place than bank. In the 1780s and 1790s, Sappho’s suicide leap became a popular subject for literary works and paintings. This was probably infl uenced by the case of Thomas Chatterton’s killing himself in 1770 and Goethe’s popular novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774; fi rst English trans. 1779). Although the attitude to suicide changed greatly from severe pun- ishment to compassion in the eighteenth century, the debate on suicide was not monolithic. The anonymous translator of Goethe’s novel (Werter and Charlotte, 1786), for instance, admired the similar sensibility of Chatterton and Werther: their feelings were “too fi ne to support the load of accumulated distress” (Preface iii). On the other hand, Charles Moore in A Full Enquiry into the Subject of Suicide (1790) criticized Werther’s “voluntary” suicide for “an ungoverned passion,” to distinguish it from 136 Masae Kawatsu

Chatterton’s “involuntary” suicide for pecuniary diffi culties (2: 141–42). Sappho’s suicide leap was in relation to two aspects of affl iction of an unrequited lover and a poetic genius. But at the time when there were contrary reactions to suicide for love (admiration for “too fi ne” a sensibility and accusation against “an ungoverned passion”), it is little wonder that Sappho’s leap took on various aspects. The French Abbé Barthélmy in Travels of Anacharsis (1788; fi rst English trans. 1791–92) reestimated Sappho as a great poet of sensibility, and presented her leap as a suicide for breaking away from cold Phaon on her own initiative (2: 64). Drawing on Barthélmy, Mary Robinson went further in Sappho and Phaon (1796) to proclaim Sappho as the representative of all women poets in later ages. Robinson’s Sappho repeatedly laments the death of “Sappho” (=her poetic self) while “I” (=her female self) is held captive by love to Phaon, so that she decides to kill her female self by bravely leaping at Leucas in order to be revived as the great “Sappho” in the future.3 Unlike Robinson, Robert Southey in “Sappho: A Monodrama” (1797) portrays Sappho as still being attached to Phaon just before leaping. Southey’s Sappho dies only to make Phaon regret what he has done, and to urge him to kill himself to join her in death. On the other hand, the Italian Alessandoro Verri in The Adventures of Sappho (1782; fi rst English trans. 1789) depicts a Sappho who is fearful of leaping because of “the timidity natural to the sex” (2: 323). Verri’s Sappho is consequently killed and thrown down by Venus. The French Étienne-François de Lantier in The Travels of Antenor in Greece and Asia (1797; fi rst English trans. 1799) also presents the fearful-leaping Sappho, and turns her leaping moment into a sublime sight that the viewers regard “with sympathetic horror” (1: 262). Such a horrid, sublime scene was also the subject of paintings such as Cipriani’s “Sappho Throwing Herself from the Rock” (1782). As we move into the nineteenth century, Lord Byron depicted Sappho as “the poet” (in the sense of a representative of poets, male or female) as well as “the lover” (in the sense of a representative of lovers, male or female). In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron intentionally disregards both the name and sex of Phaon, Sappho’s legendary love, to generalize her passion.4 While Byron resisted the current trend of heterosexualiz- ing Sappho, women poets of the 1820s and 1830s, such as Landon and Felicia Hemans, were more interested in heterosexual Sappho singing just Love as a Commodity 137 before her fatal leap. Their Sappho is like Corinne, Madame de Staël’s heroine in the popular novel Corinne ou L’Italie (1807), who sang her last song before death.5 Both Landon and Hemans depict their Sappho as an exemplar of a woman of genius who considers love more important than fame. However, unlike Hemans or any other writer in any time, Landon goes further to rewrite the traditional story of Sappho. I will examine Landon’s Sappho in detail in the next section.

Landon’s Fiction of Sappho “Sappho” was published as Sketch the First in the Second Series of “Poetical Sketches” in the Literary Gazette 276 (4 May 1822). In the opening lines, like Corinne in Francois Gérard’s painting “Corinne au cap Misene” (1822), Landon’s Sappho “leant upon her harp” in front of an audience of “thousands” to worship, taking “a pause / Of breathless, agitated eagerness” (1–5).6 But, when her eyes rest on “a Youth” who re- minds her of “other days / And young warm feelings” (22–23), the poem goes on to deviate considerably from the traditional story of Sappho and Phaon. Ovid’s Sappho had taught literature to more than 100 women and loved them before she fell in love with Phaon. On the other hand, Landon’s young Sappho had loved an older man and learned from him how to write poems, before she met Phaon:

he loved her too, But not as she did — she was unto him As a young bird, whose early fl ight he trained, Whose fi rst wild songs were sweet, for he had taught Those songs — but she looked up to him with all Youth’s deep and passionate idolatry: Love was her heart’s sole universe — he was To her, Hope, Genius, Energy, the God Her inmost spirit worshipped — in whose smile Was all e’en minstrel pride held precious; praise Was prized but as the echo of his own. (27–40) Sappho’s love for her fi rst love “gave / That soft and melancholy tender ness / Which was the magic of her song” (52–54). As a result, 138 Masae Kawatsu

“strangers heard her name, and eyes that never / Had looked on Sappho, yet had wept with her” (47–48). Sappho thus won worldwide fame for her poetry. Traditionally, Phaon had been Sappho’s famous lost love, but in Landon’s poem, he is merely the living image of her ﬁ rst love: “That Youth / Who knelt before her was so like the shape / That haunted her spring dreams — the same dark eyes” (54–56). Moreover, Phaon sounds exactly like her ﬁ rst love, so Sappho no sooner hears the young man’s voice than falls in love with him. From that moment, the story of Landon’s Sappho returns to the traditional plot. She was soon deserted by Phaon and “knew that talents, riches, fame / May not soothe slighted love” (71–72). Skipping over a description of her legendary leap from the rock of Leucas into the sea, the last 5 lines of the poem show that Sappho is dead at present and will have a considerable reputation as a poet in the future:

- - - There is a dark rock looks on the blue sea; ’Twas there love’s last song echoed — there She sleeps, Whose lyre was crowned with laurel, and whose name Will be remembered long as Love or Song Are sacred — the devoted Sappho! (73–77)

In this poem, Landon thus created her Sappho modeled on herself who had just started her career with the help of Jerdan and who formed a private relationship with him, too. A year before the publication of the poetic sketch “Sappho,” and three years before he gave her the title of the “English Sappho,” Jerdan had called her “the fair Sappho” in an anonymous review of her fi rst collection The Fate of Adelaide published under her real name in 1821 (London Literary Gazette 237 [4 August 1821]: 492). This review probably prompted her to create a young Sappho like herself who has learned “love” and “song” from an older man in the poetic sketch published under L. E. L., the initials that Landon had ap- pended in the Literary Gazette. As The Fate of Adelaide did not gain attention, there were few who knew the real name and age of L. E. L. Edward Bulwer-Lytton later remembered that he and his fellow-students at Cambridge “guessed at the author,” and when they knew “it was Love as a Commodity 139 female,” they conjectured, “Was she young? Was she pretty? And — for there were some embryo fortune-hunters among us — was she rich?” (New Monthly Magazine 32 [Dec. 1821]: 546). As Lawford has put it, a young woman’s love for an older man might endow the poem with “the depth of erotic feeling” (“Thou” 26). But who but Jerdan, the fi rst reader of Landon’s work as the editor of Literary Gazette, noticed the sexual implication? Indeed, in his autobiography published fourteen years after Landon’s death, Jerdan alluded to their secret relationship, stating that “From day to day and hour to hour, it was mine to facilitate her studies, to shape her objects, to regulate her taste, to direct her genius, and cultivate the divine organisation of her being” (Autobiography 3: 169) and that he was the “master-key” to solve “the question of their [her compositions’] reality or romance” (3: 170). Landon could leave this unnoticed by most readers through introducing Sappho’s legendary lover Phaon as her second love. In other words, a man she loves unrequitedly is, as any reader expects, not her fi rst love but her second love. Unlike Ovid’s Sappho who changed from homosexual to heterosexual, and whose homosexuality spoiled her poetic fame, Landon’s Sappho is always heterosexual, which conformed to the contemporary image of Sappho except for Byron’s interpretation. And unlike real heterosexual love, Sappho’s love for Phaon is unrequited and hopelessly doomed, therefore, pure and chaste. Unlike Landon herself, Sappho is never threatened to conceive and give birth. Such a lovelorn but implicitly pure woman also conformed to the ideal image of desexualized women at the time. Moreover, unlike Mary Robinson’s Sappho, Landon’s Sappho merely laments the loss of love and not the loss of poetic voice. Then, how and why did she take a fatal leap? She would not have aggressively done so in order to become an immortal poet like Robinson’s Sappho. But, it remains completely obscure whether Landon’s Sappho was willing to do so, for example, to make unfaithful Phaon feel regret at losing her, as Southey’s Sappho did, or whether she was unwilling and reluctant to do so because of feminine timidity, as Verri’s and Lantier’s Sappho did. As Landon’s poem skips the leap moment, it is also uncertain whether her Sappho really leaped or not. Readers who know the traditional story of Sappho may presume from the line “There is a dark rock looks on the blue sea” that Landon’s Sappho leaped from the Leucadian rocks to the sea. However, the poem seems to offer the possibility of another reading 140 Masae Kawatsu all the more so because of the lack of description about the leaping and place name. If we remember that Sappho’s traditional leaping or falling had often connoted her sexual fall, it might be Landon’s intention to avoid depicting Sappho’s leaping so as to keep her chaste. In this way, Landon managed to sublimate her own strictly prohibited, real passion in a fi ction of Sappho’s pure passion. The technique to transform real love into fi ctitious love became more ingenious in The Improvisatrice. The main tragic love story of the eponymous unnamed heroine and her beloved Lorenzo is interweaved with six other love stories she sings as a dramatic monologue or as a public performance before a large audience. “Sappho’s Song” is the fi rst of these stories. The poem begins with Sappho’s “Farewell” to her lute (Improvisatrice 10).7 Then she looked back on the past:

It was my evil star above, Not my sweet lute, that wrought me wrong: It was not song that taught me love, But it was love that taught me song.

If song be past, and hope undone, And pulse, and head, and heart, are ﬂ ame; It is thy work, thou faithless one! But, no!— I will not name thy name! (10–11)

The famous lines, “It was not song that taught me love, / But it was love that taught me song,” could be read autobiographically. If this Sappho is Landon, “thou faithless one” may refer to Jerdan. However, Landon’s contemporaries, except for Jerdan, would not have noticed any autobiographical implication. It would be impossible for them to see the unnamed man as anybody other than Phaon, even though Sappho says she “will not name thy name!” A scene where the Improvisatrice sings her love song to her beloved Lorenzo, after he has left her, also provides the possibility of an autobiographical reading:

I loved him as young Genius loves, When its own wild and radical heaven Love as a Commodity 141

Of starry thought burns with the light, The love, the life, by passion given. I loved him, too, as woman loves — Reckless of sorrow, sin, or scorn: (64–65)

The Improvisatrice loved Lorenzo “as young Genius loves,” as if the younger Sappho of the poetic sketch loved her fi rst love. Then the Impro- visatrice goes on, “I loved him, too, as woman loves — / Reckless of sorrow, sin, or scorn,” as if she confesses her improper relationship with him. However, actually, she just had met him several days before and loved him at fi rst sight. They had not exchanged words yet (“We did not speak, / But the heart breathed upon each cheek”) (63) and he had kissed her only on the hand (“I felt my hand trembling in his; — / Another moment, and his kiss / Had burnt upon it”) (64). Despite an erotic connotation in her expression (“I loved him, too, as woman loves — / Reckless of sorrow, sin, or scorn”), her love for Lorenzo remains pure. Katherine Montwieler explained that love is for the Improvisatrice “a solipsistic experience” (26) and that Landon encouraged readers to be absorbed in onanistic pleasure of reading love poetry to warn them against “the very real dangers of love” (25). Certainly, for both the Improvisatrice and readers, fi ctional love is safe from sexual corruption after all. But, at the same time, such a reading depends on readers’ knowledge of the traditional story of Sappho. Like her own fi ction of Sappho, the Improvisatrice merely laments her pure love unrequited long before Lorenzo marries with a girl his parents have chosen for him, and the poem ends with her death.

The Unbroken Sameness The theme of Landon’s poetry was almost always the same: doomed love and death. In a review of The Improvisatrice, the Literary Magnet pointed out that the “unbroken sameness” was “the chief fault which pervades the poetry of L. E. L.” (2 [1824]: 107). The Westminster Review also criticized that “nearly all her poetry relates to love” and advised her “to avoid the subject of love, a topic so full of words and so barren of thought” (MaGann and Riess 302, 303). But The Improvisatirice went through six editions during the ﬁ rst publishing year and gave Landon a 142 Masae Kawatsu big break. She continued to publish the same love poems in her volumes and literary annuals or gift books. Her other Corinne-like Sappho character, “Erinna,” sings as follows:

I have told passionate tales of breaking hearts, Of young cheeks fading even before the rose; My songs have been the mournful history Of woman’s tenderness and woman’s tears; I have touch’d but the spirit’s gentlest chords, — Surely the ﬁ ttest for my maiden hand; — And in their truth my immortality. 8

But, at last, the scandal about her improper relationship with Jerdan occurred in 1826. The fi rst was an article under the head of “Sapphics and Erotics” in the Sunday Times (5 March 1826). It reports that last September a “well-known English Sappho” committed “a faux pas with a literary man, the father of several children,” or, “her Benedict (though not Benedictus) Phaon” and that she had given birth to “a young chubby Terpander, or son of a lyre, two years before” (original emphasis; qtd. in Lawford, “Thou” 35). This article referred to their fi rst child’s birthdate, though of the opposite gender (Lawford, “Diary” 36; “Thou” 35). Next month, a letter “To the Editor of the Literary Gazette” in the Ass: or, Weekly Beast of Burden mentioned their real names, stating that “you have given the fi nishing stroke of inspiration to Miss Landon, who has become a very Sappho under your hands,” and “[a]fter this you may do any thing” (1 [1 April 1826]: 8). The Ass also printed parody poems on the sexual relation of Landon and Jerdan, pretending to be written by L. E. L. (“Charms of Nature” and “Bower of Love”). There were similar scandalous articles in the Wasp (7 and 14 October 1826) as well.9 Despite the fact that these articles reported an almost true story, Landon completely denied them privately as well as publicly. In a letter dated June 1826 to Katherine Thomson, the wife of a home doctor of the Landons, she wrote, “I think of the treatment I have received until my very soul writhes under the powerlessness of its anger. It is only because I am poor, unprotected, and dependent on popularity, that I am a mark for all the gratuitous insolence and malice of idleness and ill-nature” (Blanchard 1: 50) and stressed that Jerdan was just “a friend” in “business, whether literary or pecuniary” (1: 55). Love as a Commodity 143

In a preface to The Venetian Bracelet published in October 1829, she defends herself as well as her poetry as follows:

I allude to the blame and eulogy which have been equally bestowed on my frequent choice of Love as my source of song. I can only say, that for a woman, whose infl uence and whose sphere must be in the affections, what subject can be more fi tting than one which it is her peculiar prov- ince to refi ne, spiritualise, and exalt? I have always sought to paint it self-denying, devoted, and making an almost religion of its truth; and I must add, that such as I would wish to draw her, woman actuated by an attachment as intense as it is true, as pure as it is deep, is not only more admirable as a heroine, but also in actual life, than one whose idea of love is that of light amusement, or at worst of vain mortifi cation. With regard to the frequent application of my works to myself, considering that I sometimes pourtrayed love unrequited, then betrayed, and again destroyed by death — may I hint the conclusions are not quite logically drawn, as assuredly the same mind cannot have suffered such varied modes of misery. However, if I must have an unhappy passion, I can only console myself with my own perfect unconsciousness of so great a misfortune. (McGann and Riess 103)

Following gender divisions of her time, Landon advocates that the subject of love is the most suitable for women poets because the feminine sphere is “in the affections.” She then stressed that she had not experienced such “an unhappy passion” frequently depicted in her work. Landon thus defended herself as being sexually innocent, but the year 1829 saw the birth of her third child. Nevertheless, Landon’s earliest biographers such as Emma Roberts and Laman Blanchard believed her deception (Roberts 5–36; Blanchard 1: 51–58).

Love as a Commodity Now, attention should be paid to the sameness of Landon’s work and her complete denial of real feeling in it. Glennis Stephenson considers the “piling up of the cliché” in her work as “an unmistakable way of emphasising artiﬁ ce” (122). This would also seem to make it clear why her poetry sold well at that time. As William Makepeace Thackery criticized in 1837, the sameness was 144 Masae Kawatsu characteristic of the literary annuals or gift-books to which Landon was one of the regular contributors:10

It is hardly necessary to examine these books and designs one by one—they all bear the same character, and are exactly like the “Books of Beauty,” “Flowers of Loveliness,” and so on, which appeared last year. . . . Miss Landon, Miss Mitford, or my Lady Blessington, writes a song upon the opposite page, about water-lily, chilly, stilly, shivering beside a streamlet, plighted, blighted, love-benighted, falsehood sharper than a gimlet, lost affection, recollection, cut connexion, tears in torrents, true-love token, spoken, broken, sighing, dying, girl of Florence; and so on. (758)

Conversely, the sameness could be marketable for female contributors. As the Countess of Blessington sings, “Wither’d hopes, and faded fl owers, / Beauties pining in their bowers; / Broken harps and untuned lyres; / Lutes neglected, unquench’d fi res” are “all the stock in trade / With which a modern poem’s made” (11–14, 47–48). Furthermore, annuals not only provided the works with the same expression and theme, but also repub- lished an already published poem with a different title in other annuals as if it were a new one. This clearly explains the status of poetry of the time as a mere consumable commodity. Moreover, annuals were less books purchasers bought to read themselves than “gifts” they gave some close friends or family (Rappoport 446), and a man in love with a woman might give her one in the hope of winning her heart (Wallace 12). In the New Monthly Magazine of 1 January 1825, the Literary Souvenir was advertised as a “present that no gentleman need be ashamed to place in the hands of a lady on a New Year’s Day” (“New Publications” 26). In Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, John Wilson (“Christopher North”) even guaranteed that if you present a lady with the Literary Souvenir, it is “a hundred to one that you are a married man in six weeks or two months; nay, if it be a ‘large paper copy,’ one fl esh will ye be before the new moon” (94). In other words, as Jennifer Wallace notes, female readers’ preferences of love and sentiment commanded the literary market at the time (113). To conclude, transforming her real passion to fi ctional passion, Landon creates a Sappho who is, unlike Ovid’s, always heterosexual and Love as a Commodity 145

modest, therefore blameless, and who always laments the loss of love, considering love more important than fame. Even after the rumor, she kept publishing many poems on the same theme, and did not hesitate to reprint her poetic sketch “Sappho” in The Vow of the Peacock, and Other Poems in 1835.11 No doubt Landon was very conﬁ dent of success in mar- keting Sappho’s ﬁ ctional love to satisfy female readers’ demands. Francis Mahoney appropriately wrote in the Fraser’s Magazine in 1833: “[Landon] does right in thinking that Sappho knew what she was about when she chose the tender passion as the theme for woman. . . . she is a very nice, unbluestockingish, well-dressed, Fig. 1. Author of “Romance and Reality,” Fraser’s and trim-looking young lady, Magazine 8 (Oct. 1833): opposite 433. fond of sitting pretty much as Croquis (who has hit her likeness admirably) has depicted her” (433). And Landon’s portrait (Fig. 1) appeared on the opposite page. (Professor at Nagoya University of Economics)

* This essay draws on a paper read at the 43rd Wordsworth Summer Conference, 7 August 2014, at Rydal, UK. It is supported by a Grand-in- Aid for Scientiﬁ c Research (C) (No. 24520324) from JSPS.

Notes 1 Thereafter Landon was called a “Song-born Sappho of our Age” (“Literary Dialogues No. 1: Neddy Bulwer and Letty Landon,” The Age [25 Dec. 1831]) (McGann and Riess 362); “Sappho of a polished age! / . . . / Sights, attuned to Sappho’s shell” ([John A. Heraud,] The English Bijou Almanac for 146 Masae Kawatsu

1838) (McGann and Riess 369); “Snub-nosed Brompton Sappho” (in Benjamin Disraeli’s description) (qtd. in Leighton 46). 2 About Jerdan’s “puffi ng,” see Pearson 5; “Puffi ng and Fishing” 221. 3 On Mary Robinson’s Sappho, see Kawatsu, Sapphos ch. 9. 4 On Byron’s Sappho, see Kawatsu, “The Poet and the Lover.” 5 On the fashion of the last songs by women poets in the late Romantic and Victorian period, see Reynolds 277–30. On the infl uence that the improvisatrice fi gure of Staël’s Corinne had in nineteenth-century British women poets, see Esterhammer 92–103. 6 All citations of Landon’s “Sappho” are from Poems from The Literary Gazette. 7 All citations of The Improvisatrice are from Woodstock edition, cited by page number. 8 “Erinna” was published in The Golden Violet, with Its Tales of Romance and Chivalry: and Other Poems, by L. E. L. (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1827) 241–68. Citations of “Erinna” are from Poetical Works 221. 9 “Quacks of the Day. No. 2. William Jerdan” (The Wasp [7 October 1826]: 20–23), and “Retributive Term” (The Wasp [14 October 1826]: 35–37) (qtd. in Greer 289–90; Lawford, “Diary” 37; Stephenson 36). 10 Her fi rst contribution was to Forget Me Not in 1823, which was followed by contributions to The Keepsake, Heath’s Book of Beauty, The Pictorial Album, The Amulet, and her edited Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap-Book, among others. 11 Then it reprinted again posthumously in The Lyre. Fugitive Poetry of the Nineteenth Century (1841).

Works Cited Addison, [John]. “The Life of Sappho.” The Works of Anacreon. . . . To Which are Added the Odes, Fragments, and Epigrams of Sappho. Trans. Addison. London: John Watts, 1735. 249–55. Print. Addison, Joseph. The Spectator. Ed. Donald F. Bond. 5vols. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1965. Print. Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Print. Barthélmy, [Jean-Jacques], Abbé. Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece. [Trans. William Beaumont.] 7 vols. London: Robinson, 1790–91. Print. Bayle, Pierre. An Historical and Critical Dictionary. 4 vols. London: Harper, 1710. Print. Blanchard, Laman. Life and Literary Remains of L. E. L. 2 vols. London: Henry Colburn, 1841. Print. Love as a Commodity 147

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