Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
L. E. L.
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Standard Name: L. E. L.
Birth Name: Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Pseudonym: L.
Pseudonym: L. E. L.
Used Form: LEL
Used Form: L.E.L.
LEL was one of the most prolific and popular authors of her day. She produced an immense corpus of poetry, several works of fiction (the first a particularly striking silver fork novel), and considerable review and editorial work. Her work more than any other popularized the persona of the lovelorn, doomed poetess in the early nineteenth century.
Byron
and Wordsworth
were important poetic influences. Books that Elizabeth Barrett owned and kept until her death included Philip James Bailey
's Festus, A Poem, a major text of the spasmodic school, L. E. L.
Elizabeth Moody
engagingly converts Sappho
into a contemporary in Sappho Burns her Books and Cultivates the Culinary Arts, 1798.
Jay, Peter, and Caroline Lewis. Sappho Through English Poetry. Anvil Press Poetry.
98
But many women poets accepted the notion of her rejected love for Phaon: Robinson
Intertextuality and Influence
Harriet Smythies
In a critical preface HS
reveals her gender though not her name. She opens by invoking the author of Rienzi (either, Mary Russell Mitford
or Edward Bulwer Lytton
). The two groups of lovers and...
Leisure and Society
Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
Late in life EOB
ran a kind of salon which was remarkable for being bohemian and operating on a shoestring: with tea rather than wine (unlike the lavish salons of contemporary society hostesses like Lady Holland
Literary responses
Felicia Hemans
Maria Jane Jewsbury
had already begun the idealisation of FH
in 1830 with her portrait of Egeria in The History of a Nonchalant: a muse, a grace, a variable child, a dependent woman—the Italy...
Literary responses
Eliza Cook
A short and patronising notice of the volume in the Athenæum characterized EC
as a sort of L. E. L.
for the working classes writing for the not very select readers of a provincial newspaper...
Literary responses
Eliza Cook
An 1848 preface to a US edition of her poems ranked EC
's popularity almost as high as that of Felicia Hemans
or Caroline Norton
. It characterises her work in terms of emotion and...
Literary responses
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
The Athenæum carried a signed review for this book by Virginia Woolf
, who went straight to the heart of the matter. It would be easy to make fun of her; equally easy to condescend...
Literary responses
Emma Roberts
ER
's reputation stood high at her death, though it was subject to the ambivalence commonly met with by women writers at this period. The anonymous memoirist on her began by contradicting the barbarous opinion...
Literary responses
Anna Eliza Bray
L. E. L.
contributed what AEB
felt to be an ably-written review to the Literary Gazette.
Bray, Anna Eliza. Autobiography of Anna Eliza Bray. Editor Kempe, John A., Chapman and Hall.
328
In a letter dated 21 January 1838, Robert Southey
wrote that it was a very agreeable disappointment...
Literary responses
Ann Hawkshaw
In a review for the Athenæum, George Walter Thornbury
stated abruptly that AH
's collection has at least two merits,—it has no Preface and it has a purpose. Finding that the sonnets do not...
Occupation
Frances Arabella Rowden
FAR
was clearly a key element, perhaps the key element, in the success of the Hans Place school. She taught the general curriculum there for nearly twenty-five years, from its founding until 1818, and she...
Performance of text
Clara Balfour
CB
also spoke frequently on literature, focussing on women writers. In her lecture entitled The Female Poets of England, delivered at the opening of the eighteenth session of the Cheltenham Literary and Philosophical Institution
Publishing
Mary Maria Colling
The full title reads Fables and other Pieces in Verse . . . With some account of the author, in letters to Robert Southey
Esq. . . . by Mrs. Bray. The dedicatory poem...
