L.E.L. by Lucasta Miller

One morning in October 1838, a 36-year-old Englishwoman was found dead in her bedroom in Cape Coast Castle, West Africa. She was the newly married wife of George Maclean, governor of the region – part of present-day Ghana – and had moved there only weeks earlier. Her name was Letitia Elizabeth Landon, but she was better known by her initials, L.E.L., under which she wrote poetry. Landon wasn’t just any poet, said Jane Ridley in The Daily Telegraph. Her “lovesick verses”, published from her late teens on, had turned her into a sensation, a figure known as the “female Byron”. And yet her life – in keeping with its abysmal end – was tragic. As Lucasta Miller shows in this terrific biography, Landon was a woman destroyed by the hypocrisy and sexism of early 19th century British society.

A “precociously talented child”, Landon grew up in a prosperous middle-class household in west London, said John Carey in The Sunday Times. But when she was 18, her father went bankrupt and abandoned the family. Desperate for money, her mother sought to exploit her daughter’s facility for verse, and dispatched her poems to William Jerdan, the influential editor of The Literary Gazette. Seeing the young poet as the “answer to the gaping absence left by Byron’s sudden death in 1824”, Jerdan became her “mentor and Svengali”, said Paula Byrne in The Times. Under his patronage, her confessional verse acquired a huge readership, and she was soon the “most famous female poet in England”.

Not that she benefited much from that, said Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. Not only did Jerdan commandeer the profits from her work, but the married publisher, who “had a thing for lisping poetesses barely out of childhood”, also became his protégée’s lover. The affair lasted years, and Landon bore him three children (all sent to foster homes), but eventually it became public when Jerdan’s charwoman spied on the couple making love and told a newspaper. Left with little choice but to try and “launder her reputation by finding a respectable husband”, Landon married George Maclean, a “third-rate colonial administrator” who seems not to have been aware of her history. It isn’t quite clear what happened at the end, said Jane Ridley. Some have speculated that Landon was murdered, but Miller makes a “convincing case” that she poisoned herself with prussic acid. A “rich mix of literary criticism and impeccable research”, this is a compelling book about the victim of a misogynist culture.