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.
Black and white photograph of a three-quarter length drawing of L.E.L. in chalk and pencil by Daniel Maclise, early 1830s. She is wearing a white dress whose wasp waist is accentuated by a broad belt, large billowing skirt and upper sleeves, and high standaway collar. Her dark, shining hair is centre-parted and pulled back, with tiny kiss-curls below and a tall, plaited arrangement above. Her expression is languishing. National Portrait Gallery.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Textual Features Caroline Norton
The verse narrative is written in rhyming couplets, sometimes in very regular pentameter and at others in quite irregular metre that reflects, for instance, the anguish of the speaker's musings on memory and death. Stylistically...
Textual Features Mary Oxlie
The poem gives ten lines to humble self-deprecation, in iambic pentameter couplets: a metre which serves to separate this passage from the rest, since the remaining 42 lines, which praise Drummond 's descriptive powers, are...
Textual Features Dorothy Wellesley
DW 's selection, though, demonstrates a serious interest in women's literary and feminist history. Of the selections whose authors can be identified, almost half are women. Though Marguerite, Lady Blessington , doyenne of the albums...
Textual Features Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington
In the plot, Jim is suspected in the murder of a policeman, but later becomes sensibly disillusioned with repeal. Grace improves her natural goodness by reading the Bible in an almost Protestant manner. She ministers...
Textual Features Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington
Critic Paula R. Feldman writes that she filled in the gaps in each literary annual with her own poetry or prose.
Feldman, Paula R., editor. British Women Poets of the Romantic Era. John Hopkins University Press.
150
In the Book of Beauty for 1839, for instance, Blessington contributed two poems...
Reception Felicia Hemans
FH 's circulation in her lifetime rivalled that of her most prominent male contemporaries. With sales of about 18,000 volumes, she outsold Coleridge and Wordsworth , if not Scott and Byron . She proved, as...
Reception Emma Roberts
At the same time the memoir seems concerned to defend ER against any hint of being interested in deep investigations or profound reflections, which it implies would have been culpably unfeminine. It quotes a Calcutta...
Publishing Isabel Hill
Bentley had already offered the translation job to three or four other writers. After Hill completed her work she learned that L. E. L had rendered Corinne's odes into English. In the end L.E.L's translations...
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...
Publishing Regina Maria Roche
The work bears a dedication, dated at London on 10 April 1828, to Princess Augusta Sophia .
Garside, Peter et al., editors. The English Novel 1770-1829. Oxford University Press.
2: 671
In her preface RMR , unusually, says something about herself, and the financial and emotional problems...
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
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...
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...
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...

Timeline

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Texts

L. E. L.,. The Vow of the Peacock. Editor Sypher, Francis Jacques, Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1997.
L. E. L.,. The Works of L.E. Landon. E. L. Carey and A. Hart, 1838.
L. E. L., and Emma Roberts. The Zenana. Fisher, 1839.
L. E. L.,. Traits and Trials of Early Life. H. Colburn, 1836.
Hill, Isabel et al. “Translator’s Preface; Madame de Staël”. Corinne; or, Italy, translated by. Isabel Hill and L. E. L., A. L. Burt, 1857, p. iii - iv; v-xxi.