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
Intertextuality and Influence Felicia Hemans
Some of the poems in Records of Woman have recently been embraced by certain scholars (including Isobel Armstrong in Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics, who discusses them alongside poems by L. E. L.
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Catherine Hume
The starting-point for the poem is the tradition (subtly questioned) of Sappho's suicide as an abandoned woman; this fact links the text to other responses to the topic by other women poets including Felicia Hemans
Intertextuality and Influence Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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.
Intertextuality and Influence Frances Trollope
FT 's years of literary success were marked by tragedy: she lost two of her children to consumption, and eventually lost a third.
Nadel, Ira Bruce, and William E. Fredeman, editors. Dictionary of Literary Biography 21. Gale Research, 1983.
21: 324
Heineman, Helen. Mrs. Trollope: The Triumphant Feminine in the Nineteenth Century. Ohio University Press, 1979.
135
However, her writing brought her into a supportive network...
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 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 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 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 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 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, 1884.
328
In a letter dated 21 January 1838, Robert Southey wrote that it was a very agreeable disappointment...
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...
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...

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