Abstract
Letitia Elizabeth Landon was lauded, berated, and commodified throughout her lifetime. As her poems proliferated throughout the 1820s and 1830s, her name was linked in the gossip pages with various influential men. After a protracted courtship, she married the governor of Cape Coast Castle, and moved to the Gold Coast. Two months later Landon was found dead; she was all but forgotten until 1982 when Germaine Greer re-introduced Landon to the world, as a woman who “seems to have capitulated… utterly to the sexual double standard” (21). As more scholars read Landon, they came to other conclusions, and she was alternately depicted as innocent, capitalist, proto-feminist, and unwed mother. This chapter explores the various ways critics have (mis-)read Landon’s life and work.
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Montwieler, K. (2017). Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838): Whose Poetess?. In: Ayres, B. (eds) Biographical Misrepresentations of British Women Writers. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56750-1_6
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