Victorian Poetry

The Victorian poetess

corner of the sheet which contained the three magical letters of 'L.E.L.'
And all of us praised the verse, and all of us guessed at the author. We soon
learned it was a female, and our admiration was doubled, and our
conjectures tripled. Was she young? Was she pretty?" 15 Bulwer-Lytton
notably attributes L.E.L.'s exponential popularity as much to the mystery
of her identity as to her poetry. His interest lies in female body that the
poetry simultaneously announces and veils.
The ensuing scandals surrounding L.E.L.'s professional life concentrated
more and more oppressive attention on her actual body than her extensive
body of writing. Speculation turned to the singular status of an unmarried
single woman living in a boarding house, in constant professional contact
with men. Take, for example, William Maginn's conclusion to a profile in
Fraser's in 1833: "But why is she Miss Landon? 'A fault like this should be
corrected.'" 16 Female publication already carried implications of self-
advertisement and immodest circulation in the market. Landon's circum-
stances, therefore, made her doubly vulnerable. Her life was eventually
soured by scandal to the point where she seems to have been driven into the
equivalent - for a woman without Byron's means - of Byronic exile: hasty
marriage took her out of England to West Africa, where she soon died in
circumstances that suggested suicide. The popularity that allowed her to
support herself independently, combined with ambiguous class origins that
made scandal difficult to face down, seemed literally to have proved fatal
when they led to the suggestion that not only her works but also her person
were circulating widely. Although Byron's sexual scandal drove him from
England, his exiled personae provided grist for his poetic mill for years
thereafter, and his reputation did not prevent his poetry from becoming the
most lucrative in England to date. In contrast, the sexual double standard
inflected rumors about L.E.L.'s sexual impropriety to the extent that her
death seemed to many a fitting if tragic denouement to a poetic future that
was already foreclosed. Blanchard's identification of L.E.L. with Sappho
thus aptly locates hers as the fate of a poetess rather than a poet.

Ill

Despite the scandalous potential of the poetess, there were also profound
continuities between cultural constructions of her role and that of the
respectable woman, and they strengthened during the early years of
Victoria's reign as public adherence to domestic ideology increased. There
is some truth in the widespread view that this period witnessed a consolida-
tion of the notion of separate spheres for middle-class men and women,
where men took responsibility for the public world of work and women

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