SUSAN BROWNElizabeth Landon (known as L.E.L.), claimed that she was "voted one"
with Sappho when she published her second volume, The Improvisatrice
(1824). 11 Blanchard's biocritical method formed part of a trend that
plagued women writers throughout the century and beyond. Critics
exploited the fact that more of Sappho's reputation than her actual poetry
remained. The fragmented voice of the writer whom the ancients respected
as the progenitor of lyric was largely obscured as commentators focused
attention on her deeply unhappy biographical legend. In practice this
meant that there was little basis for aesthetic judgment of poetesses' work
but their lives were scrutinized for conformity to perceived womanly and
poetic standards, however conflicting those might be. Sappho's putative
biography conveniently enshrined the antagonism between respectable
femininity and poetic aspiration. Biographers capitalized on memoirs of
women whose lives seemed to rehearse the unhappy conjunction of the
two, initiating - as Tricia Lootens shows - a pernicious form of hagio-
graphy. 12
Although Sappho was by default the proper name for the poetess, it was
not the sole one employed by women poets themselves, who speak in the
voices of many others: Corinne, Eulalie, Arabella Stuart, Properzia Rossi,
Caterina, Bertha, Beatrice, Laura, the Pythoness (based on the priestess at
Delphi). The voice of the poetess for Hemans, L.E.L., and other poets after
them took the form of a self-consciously feminine self-staging in verse that
appropriated many bodies, lives, and identities. This voice represented a
fertile space between the expression of self and the representation of others,
between the spontaneous Romantic outpouring that becomes gendered as
female gush and a distanced dramatic voice that developed over the course
of the century into the dramatic monologue.
L.E.L. and Sappho might have been "voted one" on the publication of
The Improvisatrice but even the improvisatrice, though sapphic, is not
precisely Sappho. The contemporary urban performer of spontaneous verse
to her own musical accompaniment derives from Germaine de Stael's
Corinne (1807), one of the most influential novels for women writers in
nineteenth-century Britain. De Stael's improvisatrice is also unhappy in
love and finds no compensation in her fame, but she chooses a decorous
demise over a pyrrhic leap. L.E.L.'s version of the narrative presents a
complex layering of voices framed by that of her Florentine improvisatrice.
Even though she has "poured [her] full and burning heart / In song" (LEL
1-2), she, like Hemans, provides lyric utterances that are responses to
artistic objects rather than effusions of the heart. A series of descriptions of
her paintings - objets d'art translated from one medium to the next -
preface her songs, which are divided from her own utterances, and given
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