From fame to shame

Biographers are a shady lot. For all their claims about immortalising someone in print, as if their ink were a kind of embalming fluid, it has long been suspected that they enjoy wielding their pens more like a cosh or a scalpel. Victorian writers were especially nervous about the prospect of a biographer prodding and slashing away at their reputations. Tennyson worried that he would be ‘ripped up like a pig’ after his death, and many of his contemporaries did all they could to present their best face to posterity: hand-picking an authorised biographer; making a bonfire out of any embarrassing letters; discreetly muzzling friends who might be tempted into unflattering reminiscences. Inevitably, the results were full of gaps: when William Gladstone read the biography of George Eliot written by her husband John Cross, which had been carefully filleted to remove anything shocking or sexy, he complained: ‘It is not a Life at all’ but ‘a reticence in three volumes’.

In the case of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, a poet who published in the 1820s and 1830s under her initials L.E.L., not all of this reticence can be put down to her modesty. As Lucasta Miller points out in this densely researched and boldly original biography, far more depends upon a kind of posthumous neglect. At the height of her fame L.E.L. was one of the leading stars in a glittering literary firmament: her portrait was exhibited at the Royal Academy and Edgar Allan Poe thought her ‘genius’ so self-evident it was ‘almost unnecessary to speak’ of it.

Yet by the time Virginia Woolf published Orlando in 1928, Landon’s reputation was so low that Woolf’s hero/ine is physically nauseated by the appearance of some ‘revolting’ lines from one of her poems. (The joke is that ‘Orlando’ only needs one extra letter to spell ‘Or Landon’.)