Persona Non Grata

Letitia Elizabeth Landon understood what cultivating a personal brand meant. A prolific English poet who wrote during the 1820s and 1830s—the temporal cranny between Romanticism and Victorianism—she looked upon the burgeoning literary marketplace and wrote verse devised to satisfy the public yen for lush, sensuous emotion. Although she receded into the shadow of her nom de plume, L.E.L., she was anything but anonymous. On the contrary: L.E.L.’s trademark may have been the melodramatic song of the jilted female lover, but Landon twirled through late-night parties and salons, bedecked in frocks au courant, ever prepared to assume the mantle of a witty literary ingenue. Many of her contemporaries were perplexed as to how she could write with the tragic intensity of Sappho and still flirt at the dinner table.

In her new biography of the poet, L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated “Female Byron” (2019), Lucasta Miller argues for a reconsideration of L.E.L. by carefully, even lovingly, demonstrating the poet’s technical and theoretical sophistication. Ensconced in a misogynistic publishing industry, Landon punctured reassuring notions of identity by positing it as fundamentally shattered. As Miller writes, “Obsessively circling around her absent ‘I,’ [L.E.L.’s] poetry gives away both more and less than it promises.” In fact, “whether the ‘I’ of the poetry reflected Letitia Landon’s own true feelings remains to this day the ultimate crux of her legacy.”

The boundary between Landon, the person, and L.E.L., the poet, is labile, as it is with most writers who don’t pursue strict autobiography. Readers will probably never know how many of Landon’s experiences are inscribed in her work. But Landon was invested in the fissures and slippages that prevent easy conflation of writerly and personal identities. Once, an incredulous male party guest asked her, “You never think of such a thing as love, you who have written so [much] poetry upon it?” She replied, “Oh! That is all professional, you know!” As Miller notes, designating oneself as “professional at love” is all the more provocative with its allusion to sex work. As with her poetry, Landon invited people to interpret her words as they wished.

The rickety “I” of L.E.L.’s poetry—a first-person speaker claiming the authenticity of explosive feeling that was “all professional, you know”—indicates she perceived female identity as unstable. In The Improvisatrice (1824), L.E.L.’s popular debut novel in verse, the titular minstrel and artist offers a titillating, if kitschy, variation of lovesick femininity. It might read as maudlin today, but it’s a sly commentary gussied up in pastels. As Miller explains, L.E.L. “was a young poetess playing the role of a young poetess. In doing so, she exposed femininity itself as a masquerade.” It’s no coincidence that the Improvisatrice, whose “pulses throbbed” and “heart beat high” as “a flush of dizzy ecstacy [c]rimsoned [her] cheek”—contemporary readers went wild for a sexy, blushing heroine in a near-perpetual state of arousal—dons a mask and veil when she performs at a festival with her beloved in attendance.

Landon harbored no delusions about the exigency—and dangers—of feminine theatricality. Her livelihood turned on the efficacy of her performance and the extent to which it still charmed the public. For her, the stakes of a tarnished personal brand were pernicious on every front: her good name (already balanced on tenterhooks because of rumors of sexual impropriety) would be ruined, her financial precarity would slide into full destitution, and her professional literary life would end.

In “Lines of Life,” published in The Venetian Bracelet, The Lost Pleiad, A History of the Lyre, and Other Poems (1829)—which Miller calls L.E.L.’s “signature poem”—the poet indexes the “hypocrisy culture” that was her milieu:

I teach my lip its sweetest smile,
My tongue its softest tone;
I borrow others’ likeness, till
Almost I lose my own
 
I pass through flattery’s gilded sieve,
Whatever I would say;
In social life, all, like the blind
Must learn to feel their way.
[…]
I hear them tell some touching tale,
I swallow down the tear;
I hear them name some generous deed,
And I have learnt to sneer.
[…]
We bow to a most servile faith,
In a most servile fear;
While none among us dares to say
What none will choose to hear.

The poem’s tone shifts toward the end, drawing on the imagery of flushing cheeks and ardent lips that characterize L.E.L.’s erotic romances. The speaker, once forthright, begins to ooze tragic self-deprecation. Like the Improvisatrice, she gestures to the “blush to burn my cheek” and the “song” that “has touch’d my lips with fire,” a shift that, as Miller notes, calls into question whether the earlier verses were written in earnest. Perhaps L.E.L. was aware that intimacy with readers was as difficult as intimacy in life. If she wanted to speak plainly, it was imperative to shroud frankness in the overblown and hyper-romantic.

The slippery entity of L.E.L. was crucial to Landon’s enterprise. Like Miller, I use the poet’s initials to refer to her writerly persona and her surname, Landon, to refer to her biographical details, but parsing the two is a knotty enterprise, just as Landon would have hoped. For L.E.L.’s part, she would admonish readers not to assume too much from her verse. “We trust, we are deceived, we hope, we fair” she writes in the 1827 poem “Erinna.” The world turned upon blighted and misplaced confidence, upon projections and misreadings. And so much the better for a woman with secrets to keep—and Landon did have secrets, which became fodder in the literary gossip mill. L.E.L. wrote poetry with erotic undertones (a flower is rarely just a flower) and alluded to her private circumstances; having borne three illegitimate children, she was considered a “fallen” woman. Yet because she was wise to the performativity inherent to public life, particularly for women, Landon deployed L.E.L. as both a mask and a sieve. L.E.L.’s poetry might have expressed disappointed love, but she rebuffed claims that she was one such wilting blossom: “if I must have an unhappy passion, I can only console myself with my own perfect unconsciousness of so great a misfortune,” she writes in the preface to The Venetian Bracelet. In society, she practiced a devil-may-care bonhomie, which thwarted assumptions that she wrote from experience. Still, her flippant wit and innuendo must have implied caginess: she relied on the slipperiness of language to obscure facts.

Truth was a concept in which she held little stock. “The real Letitia Landon had no faith in eternal verities,” Miller writes. “Knowingly mired in her own moment, she was less a winsome sentimentalist than a proto-postmodern. As one of her most perceptive contemporary critics puts it, her true subject was not romance but ‘all is vanity’: what happens in a world emptied of intrinsic value.” What were people, after all, but the hollowed-out trappings of their desires, impulses, and varied theatrics? Landon knew that everyone, especially public figures, nurtured a brand, a self fashioned in hopes of being distinct, authentic, perhaps even beloved. Landon doubted the existence of much else besides performance.

***

Landon was born in 1802, in the London suburb of Brompton. Her parents, John Landon and Catherine Bishop, were unhappily married and disinclined to bestow attention upon Landon or her younger brother, Whittington. Landon also had a younger sister, Elizabeth Jane, whom Miller speculates was fathered by another man. Catherine Bishop had a roving and ambitious eye. She spent most of the week visiting friends while Landon and her brother stayed at home with their grandmother. John Landon avoided home as much as possible.

At age five, Landon was enrolled in a fancy girls’ school, where she distinguished herself as both insubordinate and talented. Catherine reveled in her daughter’s academic successes and boasted of them as she climbed the social ladder. Landon, meanwhile, was inculcated with a yearning for admiration and the motivation to “display” her literary abilities. Her poetry indexes her fraught reliance on praise and fame and even intertwines an evocation of love with images of ephemeral breath. “O’er some, Love’s shadow may but pass / As passes the breath-stain o’er glass; / And pleasures, cares, and pride combined, / Fill up the blank Love leaves behind,” she writes in The Improvisatrice. For Landon, love was nearly always tied up in an audience’s explicit approval. But like “breath-stain o’er glass,” a kind word or the heady boom of applause is ephemeral. As she became habituated to the ebb and flow of praise, first as a child eager to please her mother and later as a literary celebrity, Landon came to an understanding: the love she craved would always leave her reeling and expose her fundamental yearning.

By 1820, it was clear that her poetic gifts might be lucrative. Her father, financially ruined, abandoned his family to escape creditors; he died four years later, leaving his estranged wife and children with few resources. This scuttled Landon’s hopes for an advantageous marriage. At her mother’s urging, Landon turned her efforts toward entering the public sphere as a writer.

The Landons lived near William Jerdan, the editor of Britain’s influential Literary Gazette. The lascivious Jerdan ogled the teenage Landon as she chased a hoop around the yard. Before long, he enlisted her as both an “infant genius” and a lover. She bore him three children, all of whom she immediately gave up. Their affair was an open secret in literary circles, thus excluding Landon from genteel company, although she and Jerdan denied accusations they were sleeping together. On March 5, 1826, the Sunday Times published a report in which the Jerdan family’s charwoman claimed to have seen Landon and Jerdan engaged in an adulterous liaison. Although not referred to by name—Landon was described as the “well-known English Sappho” and Jerdan as the “literary man”—those in the know would have recognized the anonymous culprits. The article also revealed that in September 1823, Landon gave birth to Jerdan’s son (in fact Landon gave birth to a girl, Ella). Both Jerdan and Landon denied the allegations, but the newspaper reports had the potential to harpoon the latter’s career. As it was, she never recovered: women held in high public esteem wouldn’t associate with a “fallen” woman, and men didn’t want to marry one. John Forster, whose legacy is linked to his friendship with Charles Dickens, did propose to Landon in late 1834 or early 1835; Landon broke off the engagement once Forster learned of her sexual history.

However, Landon found a viable suitor in George Maclean, the Scottish-born council president of Cape Coast, West Africa, whom she married on June 7, 1838. Neither relished the union, but with Landon’s career and reputation dwindling, marriage seemed her only recourse. It was a marriage of convenience and, in Landon’s case, a last resort in her protracted stagger toward stability.

Settling down, perhaps, took a fatal toll. On October 15, 1838, Landon’s maid discovered the poet’s body collapsed on the floor of Cape Coast Castle, a bottle of prussic acid in hand. Suicide was never designated the official cause of death—after the inquest, it was recorded as an accidental overdose—but it has long been suspected. Landon’s brief tenure in West Africa was isolated and, despite her upbeat letters to friends, quite melancholy. There were also speculations that her husband’s “country wife,” Ellen, a West African native with whom Maclean lived until his legal marriage to Landon, or someone acting on Ellen’s behalf, murdered Landon. There is little evidence to support this theory beyond racist, hyper-sexualized caricatures of women of color. Miller also points to Landon’s longtime addiction to narcotics, which further muddies the line between suicide and overdose. In any case, Landon died as she had lived: resistant to legibility and, more than likely, without peace.

***

This abbreviated biography hardly reads as triumphant despite Landon’s successes. For a flash, she was the quintessential literary celebrity of her decade. Although sentimental verse and prose were regarded as the province of women, many of L.E.L.’s earliest readers were male undergraduates at Cambridge, among them the future novelist and politician Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton. (He later became Landon’s close friend and gave her away at her wedding.) By the 20th century, her poetry was lampooned as mawkish and silly, but as Miller argues, this snubbing disregards the sort of poet L.E.L. was and what made her such a renegade. Her verse assembled cultural and erotic signifiers—“buried allusions, half-quotations, and hinted insinuations,” as Miller writes—and always gestured to the present moment. Like a broken glass, her poetry refracted the milieu, offering an image that was recognizable to her contemporaries but allowed interpretations.

When The Improvisatrice was published in 1824, Jerdan wrote an unsigned puff piece in the Gazette in which he declared L.E.L. the greatest talent of the day. Since Lord Byron’s death just months earlier, Jerdan noted, the literary world was bereft of such a brilliant mind; L.E.L. could fill that void. Implied is her enduring legacy as the “female Byron.” Though Jerdan’s celebration of The Improvisatrice was far from disinterested, his instincts weren’t misplaced: in just one day, readers purchased nearly every copy of the first printing. By the end of the year, two more editions appeared and in 1825, three more. The Parisian Globe sang the book’s praises on the paper’s front page, and an American edition was also issued. L.E.L. never replicated this success, in part because she and Jerdan became embroiled in a sex scandal. Still, her next work, The Troubadour, published only one year after her debut, received positive reviews. One, in the Westminster Review, admonished her “not to be elated by the praise or guided by the … critical judgment of the Literary Gazette.” In other words, gossip regarding the relationship of editor and protégé was churning, and the reviewer urged Landon to break free. Of course, doing so wouldn’t have been a simple task; it might even have been impossible. Jerdan managed her career—and embezzled her earnings—until he lost interest. By age 27, Landon was significantly older than the girls who stirred her mentor’s desires. And by 1829, Jerdan was pursuing Mary Ann Browne, a new teenage poet whose work he published in the Gazette.

In the meantime, L.E.L. continued to produce poetry, but she never recaptured her initial acclaim. In 1827, she published The Golden Violet: her advance was paltry, and it took 10 years for the 2,000-copy print run to sell out. What’s more, her finances grew precarious. After her next book, The Venetian Bracelet, was issued in 1829, her publisher dropped her. L.E.L., it seemed, had lost her allure. By 1831, Landon was editing “annuals,” decorative collections of poetry, prose, and pictures that Miller aptly calls “the coffee table books of the day.” Designed as gifts and bearing maudlin titles such as The Keepsake and Friendship’s Offering, they were generally published during the holidays. The literary elite sneered at them as insipid travesties of high culture. Producing these compilations wasn’t a lofty sideline, but Landon was desperate for cash. The books were a crucial source of income until she married Maclean.

Landon’s career registers as yet another example of a gifted and precocious woman exploited by less talented men. Miller is pointed on this matter, particularly where it concerns Jerdan. Bankrupt by the end of 1834, he manipulated Landon’s genius for his own ends. Because he lacked a moral compass and sound professional instincts, he squandered their success and left Landon to her own financial devices. Moreover, literary tastes, once aligned with L.E.L.’s flowery poesy, changed. She was relegated to being a figure of fun for young, self-important Tories rather than a formidable author in her own right. In 1830, Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country was founded, and its London Tory staff reveled in literary gossip—much of it too specific to literary inner circles for readers (including the Brontë sisters) to comprehend. Fraser’s had somehow gathered particulars on Landon’s sex life, which they delighted in referencing with lewd innuendo. The magazine featured caricatures of her—sometimes lasciviously implying her fallenness—by artist Daniel Maclise. Within four years, Landon was a laughingstock in the male-dominated literary world, and she could only bite her tongue in response. Maybe she’d always predicted such an outcome. In 1821, by then fully yoked to Jerdan, she published “Six Songs of Love, Constancy, Romance, Inconstancy, Truth, and Marriage” in the Literary Gazette. In the second poem, she writes

Tho’ mirth may many changes ring,
’Tis but an outward show,
Even upon the fond dove’s wing
Will varying colours glow.
 
Light smiles upon my lip may gleam
And sparkle o’er my brow,
’Tis but the glisten of the stream
That hides the gold below.

Taken at the speaker’s word, one might read these lines as a promise of emotional depth: though I am young and may seem frivolous, my heart can love with the profundity of any other. But L.E.L. often defends and damns simultaneously. Indeed, the imagery she evokes tells another tale: like the white wing of a dove, which reflects a vivid spectrum of hues, people are inconstant and dissembling. L.E.L. warns readers not to trust her, although here she posits her own worldview. She was skeptical of constancy: why would she believe it existed in her readership? “But how, fair Love, canst thou become / A thing of mines—a sordid gnome?” sings the Improvisatrice. Rhetorical questions such as this register as acerbic; Landon knew precisely how love could contort into something sordid and treacherous. Her brand wasn’t merely a disguise—it was a necessary defense.

Like any female writer of the era, she was vulnerable. Charlotte Brontë, who lived apart from the literary marketplace—and who grew up reading L.E.L. together with her sisters—understood this precarity too. I suspect L.E.L.’s enigmatic persona may have inspired Brontë’s own cagey first-person narration: Lucy Snowe of Villette (1853) and, to a lesser extent, the titular Jane Eyre. “Absence was the heart of L.E.L.’s aesthetic,” writes Miller. “[She] made meaning radically unstable. Epistemologically she was a skeptic, who believed that ‘no one sees things exactly as they are, but as varied and modified by their own method of viewing.’ She vested her identity in the eye of the beholder, and yet constructed herself as a moving target. She was indeed moonlike, always waxing and waning.” L.E.L. was “a co-creation between the poet’s imagination and the reader’s fantasy,” as Miller notes. She understood the genesis of a reputation—and a brand—better than most: we can influence perception and fancy, but we cannot orchestrate it. Contemporary celebrity culture teaches us this as battalions of public relations flacks run damage control for a prominent figure who says or does something ill-advised.

“I now leave the following [p]oems to their fate: they must speak for themselves,” L.E.L. writes in the preface to The Venetian Bracelet, seeming to anticipate the 20th century notion of the death of the author. Even if her power to manipulate was potent—she played upon emotions as her tragic heroines plucked their lyres—it could never be definitive. In “Erinna,” her titular heroine remarks of her lyre, “It was my other self that had a power; / Mine, but o’er which I had not a control.” One might read these lines as a metaphor for inspiration: although the artist is the vessel, creativity is a form of spiritual possession that occurs independently from her. But L.E.L. also muddles the distinction between the art and the artist and, in doing so, implies her inability to influence her poetry’s reception. She is unwilling to state plainly whether her poetry is written from lived experience: is one’s “other self” tightly tethered to the soul, particularly when she purportedly lacks the agency to shape it? (As Miller observes, L.E.L. must have delighted in the sonic kinship between lyre and liar.) Of course, this claim of utter powerlessness is an exaggeration. L.E.L. chooses every word precisely; what she can control and exploit—namely, sensation and feeling—she will. Still, reader response is its own moving target, and the zeitgeist will take turns we cannot anticipate.

Even Landon couldn’t disregard the impact of a fickle audience. She might have been reticent to claim her own vulnerabilities, but through the character of Erinna, she delivers a frank account of living according to public verdict: “Another spirit was within my heart; / I drank the maddening cup of praise, which grew / Henceforth the fountain of my life; I lived / Only in others’ breath; a word, a look, / Were of all influence on my destiny / If praise they spoke, ’twas sunlight to my soul / Or censure, it was like the scorpion’s sting.” When I first read these lines, I thought that L.E.L. would have been a marvel on Twitter—and that she would have loathed it as much as I do for its inexorable churn of content devised for approval and popularity. She also would have recognized its capriciousness. In “Erinna,” L.E.L. draws on images of utterance and breath, another acknowledgment that whatever verses she might compose, nothing matters more tangibly than readers’ appraisal of her. For Landon, “the maddening cup of praise” might have been personally agitating—it was also one of the primary indices of financial relief. She did, quite literally, live according to “others’ breath.”

After Landon’s death, a coterie of friends wrote a biography that intimated her sexual purity. It behooved them to do so because they were tainted by their association with the poet. Gradually, she faded altogether, and British literature of the 1820s and 1830s was characterized as a moment of impoverished creativity. Virginia Woolf considered L.E.L.’s poetry the frilly stuff of a vapid virgin, which only demonstrates how thoroughly Landon’s persona had evaporated from British literary history. Dismissing “Lines of Life” as “insipid,” Woolf incorporates the poem into her novel Orlando (1928), wherein its lines make the protagonist sick to her stomach; she accidentally obliterates them by spilling a pot of ink and is pleased at the result.

But L.E.L. didn’t write for the ages; she responded with immediacy to London’s quick tempo. She more or less gave readers want they wanted, hoping that good reviews would translate into a livelihood. It’s the sort of operation that has lately been critiqued in our own era, with references to the “personal essay industrial complex,” wherein writers, typically young women seeking entrée into the literary world, peddle intimate details to exploitative editors for the sake of a broad readership. Landon’s life and career were marked by similar exploitation. She reminds us—although, for many, the reminder is superfluous—that women have long faced cultural demands to publicly confess, to perform wild emotions, and to depict trauma for gawking audiences. Like Landon, contemporary women might resist calls to bleed through their art and instead don the mask of a persona. If we’re lucky, we women learn that the roles we play can’t offer deliverance. Our disguises, which once seemed so pliable and liberating, inevitably harden into concrete and trap us anew. Every persona eventually becomes a prison—one that was perhaps there all along.