Landon (Later Maclean), Letitia Elizabeth

During the 1820s and 1830s, no other writer was more popular in England than Letitia Elizabeth Landon, who initially signed her poems on literary journals with the intriguing letters L.E.L. She was both an eclectic writer and a literary businesswoman, since she was extremely effective in promoting her literary work in order to support her independent life in London. She was also the editor of several annuals and gift books, wrote for magazines, and published numerous poems, novels, and editorials. She took part in several literary circles and had a wide network of relationships among the most active London writers and intellectuals of her time. Landon had an eccentric life, and her poetry was well received by the general public, but many critics disliked her overexposure as a public figure and, at times, the choice of her literary subjects. Her active life and mysterious and premature death just after her marriage in Africa attracted the curiosity of many biographers during the twentieth century, but only in recent times has more critical attention been paid to her extended literary output.