Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Who was Letitia Elizabeth Landon?

Letitia Elizabeth Landon, English poet and novelist, better known by her initials L. E. L. She was born at 25 Hans Place, Chelsea and lived through the most productive period of her life nearby, above the school at No.22. A precocious child with a natural gift for poetry, she was driven by the financial needs of her family to become a professional writer and thus a target for malicious gossip (although her three children by William Jerdan were successfully hidden from the public). In 1838, she married George Maclean, governor of Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast, whence she travelled, only to die a few months later of a fatal heart condition. Behind her novel style of sentimentality lie preoccupations with art, decay and loss that give her poetry its characteristic intensity and in this vein she attempted to reinterpret some of the great male texts from a woman’s perspective. She also completed three novels and a five act drama in verse.