Elegy and Exile: Letitia Landon's The Zenana

The popular lyric poet Letitia Landon, known as «LEL», died in October 1838, in the Cape Coast in west Africa, poisoned by the ingestion of hydrocyanic acid; she had married George Maclean, a British colonial governor, earlier the same year. The shock of Landon’s sudden death was compounded by its mysterious circumstances, quickly giving rise to rumours of suicide, murder, adultery, and cover-up. Landon’s first posthumous collection included a reassuring and almost certainly dishonest «Memoir» of the poet. The publication of The Zenana in 1839 fulfilled both a literary and a social need. The volume served to cool down the strong possibility of scandal in the circumstances around Landon’s death, to sanitize Landon’s reputation, and give her admiring public a final re-affirming taste of her exquisite work. This article interprets the «text» of Landon’s death in the light of new biographical work on Landon and Maclean, re-evaluation of poetry of the 1830s, and debates about the nature of modern elegy.