Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
L. E. L.
-
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.
This work she dedicated to L. E. L.
, as a faint tribute to her genius.
qtd. in
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
It was reprinted in London two years later, with the final three words dropped from the title.
Textual Production
Emma Roberts
ER
contributed to women's literary history with a memoir of her friend L. E. L.
for the latter's posthumous The Zenana, and Minor Poems, 1839.
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...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Thackeray Ritchie
The Blackstick Papers treat a wide range of topics; three of the thirteen concern women writers, and the book's frontispiece is from a miniature of Felicia Hemans
.ATR
notes the stoicism
Ritchie, Anne Thackeray. Blackstick Papers. Books for Libraries Press, 1969.
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
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...
Fictionalization
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
For centuries LMWM
has been interpreted and re-interpreted, judged less often as writer than as an exemplar of the unacceptable female. Her fame and/or notoriety flourished during her lifetime, and posthumous publications kept it alive...
Friends, Associates
Jane Loudon
In London after her father's death, Jane Webb was a frequent visitor to the family of John Martin the artist. His wife, Susan Martin, had special motherly friendship for Jane, shared to some degree...
FAK
's literary allusions here are interesting. Thomas Hood
's The Song of the Shirt is cited more than once, though Kortright insists that the governess is worse off than the seamstress because she is...
Textual Features
Christian Isobel Johnstone
It seeks to enlarge vocabulary by omitting words and leaving the young readers to supply the gaps. Topics include life in other countries. The book features poetry by L. E. L.
and Wordsworth
.
The Young Author, which first appeared in 1825 in Literary Souvenir, depicts a self-styled genius churning out reviews, album verse, love...
Timeline
No timeline events available.
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.
