L.E.L.

I encountered Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s poetry in From Romantic to Victorian, a class on the literature written in the 1820’s and 30’s, roughly framed by the deaths of Keats and Byron and the emergence of Dickens and Tennyson. The two texts for L.E.L were the The Keepsake for 1829 and Letitia Elizabeth Landon: Selected Writings, edited by Jerome McGann and Daniel Riess (Broadview, 1997). Both are fascinating texts.

As an object The Keepsake is a lovely and intriguing expression of print culture, consumerism, and the role of books in readers’ lives. In the selected works of Landon, McGann and Riess offer a fascinating look at Landon’s writing, framing her through a feminist conversation with her readers and fellow women poets. It is a reading that seems right to me, as L.E.L’s poetry strikes me as highly subversive – hidden inside the language she would be expected to use, as both a poet and a woman, are messages and ideas that are a coded assault on her times.

My paper on L.E.L explicates her poem “Verses,” an ekphrastic conversation with a portrait of a famous woman of the day.

Dangerous Women: The Idea of Beauty and the Power of Gaze
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