Why did Virginia Woolf detest the poems of Letitia Elizabeth Landon (known as “LEL”)? In Orlando, when Woolf’s androgynous, time-travelling writer inhabits a woman’s body in the 19th century, she contrives to spill ink over LEL’s lines. With this gesture, Orlando blots out the “poetess” style of overdone emotion, and at the same time signals the obliteration of LEL’s international fame in the 1820s and 1830s. This followed her mysterious death at the age of 36 in – of all remote and improbable spots – Cape Coast Castle, a white-washed building with dungeons for slaves on the slave-trading coast of West Africa, now Ghana. In her biography of LEL, Lucasta Miller’s stellar research blows two centuries of accumulated dust off a phenomenon worth unearthing.
LEL: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon excavates layer upon layer of the London world this young woman inhabited. What emerges in fascinating detail is the extent of corruption in the literary marketplace, which, a century later, still resembled – in the words of Woolf – “the Underworld”.
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