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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. She was one of the most famous English poets of her day: Letitia Elizabeth Landon, known by her initials 'L.E.L.' What was she doing in Africa? Was her death an accident, as the inquest claimed? Or had she committed suicide, or even been murdered? To her contemporaries, she was an icon, hailed as the 'female Byron', admired by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Heinrich Heine, the young Bronte sisters and Edgar Allan Poe. However, she was also a woman with secrets, the mother of three illegitimate children whose existence was subsequently wiped from the record. After her death, she became the subject of a cover-up which is only now unravelling. Too scandalous for her reputation to survive, Letitia Landon was a brilliant woman who made a Faustian pact in a ruthless world. She embodied the post-Byronic era, the 'strange pause' between the Romantics and the Victorians. This new investigation into the mystery of her life, work and death excavates a whole lost literary culture.
In this new volume, Andrew Ashfield illustrates how women extended the horizons of Romanticism by their insistent engagement with social issues such as slavery, child labor and women workers. His previous volume, "Romantic Women Poets 1770-1838," explored how women poets made important contributions to major areas of Romanticism such as landscape and seascape. Together these two volumes add new dimensions to the study of Romanticism by showing how the solitary meditation by the sea developed concurrently with major social concerns. Ashfield exposes a much more complicated relationship between the self and society than has previously prevailed in our assessments of Romanticism.
One of the most exciting developments in Romantic studies in the past decade has been the rediscovery and repositioning of women poets as vital and influential members of the Romantic literary community. This is the first volume to focus on women poets of this era and to consider how their historical reception challenges current conceptions of Romanticism. With a broad, revisionist view, the essays examine the poetry these women produced, what the poets thought about themselves and their place in the contemporary literary scene, and what the recovery of their works says about current and past theoretical frameworks. The contributors focus their attention on such poets as Felicia Hemans, Leti...
Andrew Ashfield provides an important feminist document and a genuine means of unravelling Romanticism in Romantic Women Poets, an anthology of some 180 poems from the period 1770 to 1838.