L.E.L.: The Life and Murder of Letitia E. Landon: ‘a flower of loveliness’, by Michael Gorman. London: Olympia Publishers, 2008, 292 pp. ISBN 978-1-905513-70-3. £8.99

Abstract

L.E.L.: The Life and Murder of Letitia E. Landon: 'a flower of loveliness', by Michael Gorman. London: Olympia Publishers, 2008, 292 pp. ISBN 978-1905513-70-3. £8.99 If Hello Magazine had existed in the early nineteenth century, Letitia E. Landon (1802-1838) would have been in it: a beautiful and well-dressed young woman who mingled with other celebrities, surrounded by whiffs of scandal and who suffered a mysterious and tragic early death on the coast of Africa. She was also an established poet, mentioned in the same breath as Byron and Sappho, an influential critic and editor and that rare thing at the time, a financially independent woman who supported herself by her writing. Her fame faded quickly although she had some influence on later Victorian women poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti. In the late twentieth century, with the rise of feminist literary scholarship, she became the subject of some modest academic attention and seven pages in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (Her husband, George Maclean, "Governor" of the Gold Coast got only two).1 It is hard to know what to make of this book on first acquaintance. Is it a biography or a novel or a hybrid of the two? The 'blurb' on the back cover promises both scholarship ("a plethora of authenticated material only recently discovered and collated by the present author") and sensationalism (a "dramatic, lustful and yet sadly short life" . . . "tragically cut down at the height of her powers and in her youth [actually in her mid thirties, hardly youth by nineteenth century standards] whilst living in Africa, by a vicious and evil mulatto murderess, the mistress of her husband the 'Governor' of the Gold Coast who used mysterious native means to bring about her demise". The volume opens with a ten page "biography" of L.E.L. which, while for the most part following the standard account, does not hesitate to describe her as "lustful" and a "cock-teaser", introduce illegitimate children and hint at more shock /horror revelations to come. It ends with the disclosure that L.E.L. was the author's great-great-great-grandmother. Then comes a "prologue" in which Michael Gorman describes the kindling of his interest in Lentia and his identification with her. In an extraordinary piece of purple prose he describes himself as pulled by a strange "kinetic karmic attraction to this forbear" "like some postulant kneeling to the altar of power over mind". "So many are the similarities between L.E.L. and myself that I feel at times as if another presence (hers) is guiding my hands across the keyboard to tell a story that must be told and written in the first person through the spirit of the very subject herself - in such a way that perhaps she is insistent on assisting me to complete her story as she would like it to be told." Michael Gorman visited his ancestress' grave in the company of Cynthia Lawford, who is writing a scholarly study of L.E.L. and has published some of her research in the London Review of Books2. She has tracked down documentary evidence for L.E.L. 's affair with her publisher, William Jerdan and the existence of their three children. …