L.E.L.

A famous poet, a mysterious death and a story stranger than fiction. - this is the lost life and mytserious death of the 'Female Byron'

On 15 October 1838, the body of a thirty-six-year-old woman was found in Cape Coast Castle, West Africa, a bottle of prussic acid in her hand.

In her biography of L.E.L., Lucasta Miller's stellar research blows two centuries of accumulated dust off a phenomenon worth unearthing... This book takes biography to a new level .

Lucasta Miller's fine literary detective work yields a riveting, tantalisingly ambiguous portrait of a poet whose confessional voice and savvy celebrity make her only more intriguing to modern readers.

Wonderfully entertaining... Spellbinding.

A terrific book... A compelling life of the victim of a misogynist celebrity culture, a rich mix of literary criticism and impeccable research, which reads like a novel - you keep turning the pages to discover whatever will happen next to the unfortunate L.E.L..

Compelling as a detective story, Miller’s revelatory life of Landon is a masterpiece of eloquent scholarship ... Miller's real genius lies in her forensic ability to disentangle reality from romance... splendid .

Miller explores the seedy underbelly of the era with panache … Miller’s definitive biography restores to life a poet who influenced writers such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti and Charlotte Bronte.

Miller is a brilliant explicator of the troubled trail of fact and fiction that biography leaves in its wake... a fierce and enthralling book.

A searching biography that uses historical detective work to address the riddle of a brilliant poet’s dramatic early death… L.E.L . offers a vivid, if often bleak, picture of the life and times of an extraordinary woman. Miller handles the complex story of Landon’s life with the pace and skill of a novelist, and her book should fascinate anyone interested in the history of British women’s writing , or anyone who has ever looked at histories of Romantic and Victorian literature and wondered what, exactly, happened in the gap between the two.

In a brilliant work of literary resuscitation , Lucasta Miller explores Landon’s forgotten poetry and vigorously challenges the legacy of “lies and evasions” surrounding her… brilliantly informative .

This is biography as liberation, in which a woman's story is allowed to stand on its own terms. It its firmly in the within a tradition of seminal accounts of complex women – Claire Tomalin's The Invisible Woman , Amanda Foreman's Georgiana , Lucasta Miller's own Brontë Myth – in which the power of the genre to bear witness to the complexity of women's lives is everywhere apparent.

Lucasta Miller is a biographer and critic, whose articles have appeared in a wide number of publications, especially the Guardian . She is the author of two previous books on nineteenth-century literature, The Brontë Myth and L.E.L.: the Lost Life and Mysterious Death of the 'Female Byron', and is currently an Honorary Research Associate at University College, London and a Royal Literary Fund Fellow.