SUSAN BROWNThere is no necessary relation here between Eulalie's "passionate song"
and her topic of "beating hearts": the convergence of meter and emotion is
not experientially authentic but rather artistically produced. Although the
failure here is one of life - or rather love - and not the poetess's art, in the
final lines of the poem the English male speaker attributes Eulalie's
consumptive death to the artistic practices that make women into the
material of their art: "Peace to the weary and the beating heart, / That fed
upon itself!" (231). The critical circle closes as this coda on her life and art
transforms the ethereal lotos-fruits of Eulalie's imagination into her heart.
This is the very model of female artistic production - the emotions of
woman as ground and vehicle of lyric expression - that Eulalie had
explicitly disavowed. The disjunction between the improvisatrice's poetic
world and harsh "reality" gestures at the complex matrix of material and
ideological factors that constructs the poetess in the 1830s. As Angela
Leighton argues, "A History of the Lyre" responds to reviewers' claims that
L.E.L. had done her talents a disservice in taking an easy route to poetic
fame. 13 The poem astutely reflects the critical economy within which such
facile self-construction was inescapable. The persona of L.E.L.'s poetess is a
self-consuming artifact, self-consciously delivered as an aesthetic object to
the reader. She enacts, as a number of critics have remarked, a profound
cultural alienation. Her performance is the basis of her commodification of
the female "self" in verse - but it remains empty: "A History of the Lyre"
announces itself, almost like a pun, as a history of the liar by undercutting
the naturalization of the feminine lyric. The poem exposes the commodifi-
cation of both sentiment and the spectacle of the female body "undone,"
even as it rehearses that process for us as Eulalie again produces herself as
aesthetic object. In the poem's final tableau she is indistinguishable from
what is soon to be her epitaphic sculpture: " 'twas hard to say / Which was
the actual marble" (231).
Only Hemans rivaled L.E.L. as the paramount poetess for early Victorian
readers. But, as Virginia Blain argues, L.E.L. and Hemans represent two
different strains of the poetess. 14 While both writers were ambitious,
engaging extensively with male Romanticism while insisting on a distinc-
tively feminine poetic sensibility, L.E.L. took more risks. She adapted
Byronic poetics to her own purposes just as her life came to resemble the
Byronic biography. L.E.L. was initially welcomed as a mysterious and
titillating addition to the publishing scene while still in her teens. Edward
Bulwer-Lytton's recollection of the response of Oxford undergraduates
evokes this particular poetess as an eroticized commodity: "there was
always, in the reading room of the Union, a rush every Saturday afternoon
for the Literary Gazette, and an impatient anxiety to hasten at once to that
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