Corilla Olimpica, the most famous improvvisatrice of them all. She was crowned poet laureate at the Capitol and later inspired Madame de Staël’s best seller Corinne.
The female improvvisatrice had special iconic status in women’s literature, owing to Corinne, the international best seller published in 1807 by Europe’s premier female intellectual, Germaine de Staël. Its eponymous heroine was loosely inspired by the real-life Corilla Olimpica, who had been born Maria Madalena Morelli in 1727, the daughter of a violinist. Although the historical Corilla was recently described by a modern historian as a “court poet, show-woman, adventuress,” de Staël reworked her as a heroine of sensibility. Her Corinne is an idealized conduit for truth and nature. Her unforced genius raises her to artistic heights, and leads to her being crowned poet laureate at the Capitol. But her emotional authenticity leads her into fatal conflict with oppressive societal norms. She dies of a broken heart after her aristocratic English lover rejects her for a conventional woman from his own class.
Many nineteenth-century women writers adopted Corinne as a symbolic figure embodying the conflict between their private and public roles. Some saw her as a feminist martyr. Others slotted her into a more conservative worldview. In Felicia Hemans’s treatment of the story, Corinne laments her genius as a curse because it has made her miss out on woman’s noble destiny: the domestic bliss of hearth and home, marriage and children.
Letitia took the bare bones of her plot from Corinne. Her unnamed Improvisatrice was also a poetess-genius destined to die of a broken heart when she discovers her lover is betrothed to another woman. Female readers were given the option of investing the work with their own emotional conflicts, and with de Staël’s high seriousness and liberal politics. But Letitia, who had been a rebellious tomboy in childhood, borrowed from male writers too.
She blatantly stole her frame-style structure from Thomas Moore’s commercial hit Lalla Rookh, about a male minstrel performing at the court of an Indian princess, all glittering surfaces, the literary equivalent of the Brighton Pavilion. She aped Moore’s descriptive bravura in her highly wrought depiction of the exotic Florentine palace inhabited by her heroine, with its tinkling fountains, its overpowering odor of flowers, and its marble floors cool to the touch of the naked foot.
Europe’s foremost female intellectual, Germaine de Staël, author and turban trendsetter.
She also channeled Keats’s earthier sensualism, pushing the boundaries of taste yet further than she had hitherto dared. In “The Eve of St. Agnes” the hero plays a “ditty” on the heroine’s “hollow lute.” L.E.L. borrowed the erotic metaphor, but made her female protagonist play on her own lute, a scene depicted in literal terms by Pickersgill in his 1823 painting L’Improvisatrice. Metaphorically, the lines reinforced Byron’s contention that Keats’s poetry was “a sort of mental masturbation”:
My hand kept wandering on my lute,
In music, but unconsciously
My pulses throbbed, my heart beat high,
A flush of dizzy ecstasy
Crimsoned my cheek.
The key word was “unconsciously.” Letitia was not unconscious of what she was doing, but she was determined to see how far she could push the willful blindness of her audience. It was she who, dangerously, flirted with her own destruction.
One probable source for The Improvisatrice is a clever novel published anonymously in London in 1820, Andrew of Padua, the Improvisatore. It riffs from start to finish on ideas of artifice, role-play, performance, and deception. The narrator, Furbo (Italian for “crafty”), meets an old man claiming to be the renowned improvvisatore Andrew of Padua. “Andrew” recounts the history of his glorious stage career and puts the secret of his success down to the sincerity of his performances, his unveiling of the “peculiarities of my own individual character.” But he is eventually revealed as an impostor. In reality he is not a celebrated artiste but a nobody. The irony is that he has so successfully improvised an entire life story that he is indeed a great artist. “Softly, softly,” he concludes, “do not call it falsehood, fiction is the term, and if it has amused you as well as if it had been all true, what signifies the little stratagem that I have played.”
Letitia was playing her own stratagem. The very roughness around the edges of her verse was designed to make her seem like an untutored genius. If she wrote a clunky line, she left it in because it added to the effect. But her naiveté was faux.
By now she had put in so many hours of practice that she was in reality a master craftsman. In taking on the first-person voice of the unnamed Improvisatrice, she embodied the double paradox of performed authenticity and authentic performance. She was a young poetess playing the role of a young poetess. In doing so, she exposed femininity itself as masquerade.
In The Improvisatrice, L.E.L.’s poetic idealization of female abjection reached new levels of excess, designed to titillate her readers, but also perhaps a tangential comment on the power relations between the sexes in her society. The poems within the poem, supposedly performed by the Improvisatrice herself, included a glamorized portrayal of Hindu suttee and a visceral depiction of a girl injured by running barefoot through briars (“blood was on her small snow feet”). Yet the hero of the poem, Lorenzo, is presented as effeminate and oddly limp despite his clichéd pulchritude: a mere adjunct to the ego of the heroine, a tool in her masochistic self-drama.
In real life, Letitia was dependent on the editorial power of a middle-aged, married man. By adopting a theatrically submissive role in her poetry, she could make out—to herself—that their imbalanced relationship was her choice. At the same time, she could privately humiliate her middle-aged Svengali for his failure to live up to Lorenzo’s ideal youth and beauty. In one scene she makes her imagined hero and heroine visit an art gallery together, just as she and Jerdan frequently did in real life.
The Improvisatrice has too often been read straight and found wanting, dismissed as “rubbishy sentimentality” as late as 1998 by a male scholar of the Romantics. That is a mistake. It is in fact sophisticated high camp. Indeed, the artifice, excess, and sexual ambiguity of what we now call “camp” was part and parcel of the early-nineteenth-century improvising tradition. Tommaso Sgricci was notorious for his flamboyant homosexuality. Thomas Lovell Beddoes was also homosexual, yet so uncomfortable in repressive English society that he ended up exiling himself to Europe, where he eventually committed suicide.
Humming birds or A Dandy Trio, by George Cruikshank, 1820. The fashion for improvised performing was associated with what we would now call “camp.” It is embodied by three effete young men in this imagined satire by the great cartoonist. While a limp-wristed singer warbles to the sound of his friend’s lute, a figure at the back admires himself in the glass.
Letitia’s theatrics as L.E.L. were rooted in her compromised subjectivity in a society that rendered the fallen woman null and void, just as it marginalized the homosexual. In many ways her career as a literary lion pre-echoes that of Oscar Wilde. Neither could openly admit their sexual status in public, but both flirted dangerously with exposure in their pursuit of literary celebrity. There’s a hint of queerness to L.E.L.’s performative literary sensibility, echoed in a satirical cartoon of 1820 by Cruikshank, which features two effete young men on a sofa in a drawing room, one singing, the other playing the lute, while a third admires himself in the mirror.
On July 2, 1824, Jerdan rose to new heights of puffery in his review of The Improvisatrice. Like all reviews at the time, it was of course unsigned. The superstar Byron’s death in April, he announced, had left a vacancy. Only L.E.L. could fill it. “As far as our poetical taste and critical judgment enable us to form an opinion,” the showman concluded with an exorbitant flourish, “we can adduce no instance, ancient or modern, of similar talent or excellence.”
The hype worked in a way that L.E.L.’s regular poetic contributions to the Gazet
te had not. Ackermann’s Repository commended her “extraordinary poetic talents” with as much enthusiasm as it praised French fashions. The Gentleman’s Magazine applauded the “young Lady just out of her teens” for her “vivid imagination, felicity of diction, vigorous condensation of language, and passionate intensity of sentiment.” Only the New Monthly Magazine discreetly but admiringly alluded to Letitia’s erotic subtexts: “There is…scarcely an image which is not connected with the heart by some fine and secret association.”
The first impression of The Improvisatrice sold out in a day. A second edition was issued in September, and a third before the year was out. During 1825 the book was reprinted three more times. Nor was its success limited to the home market. Its first outing received a three-column front-page review in the Parisian Globe, followed by a second adulatory article a year later, and it was also published in America.
While Letitia’s poetry sentimentalized neglected genius, her own career demonstrates how deeply she had internalized her mother’s social ambitions. In August, the address of “Miss Letitia Elizabeth Landon” was leaked to Blackwood’s Magazine in an attempt to solicit invitations with the aim of establishing her as a literary lion. The so-called review barely touched on the literary qualities of The Improvisatrice but offered directions as to how to get to 131 Sloane Street from Hyde Park Gate.
The invitations clearly started coming immediately, as Mary Howitt’s gossipy letter about the new girl genius was written on August 24. Previously, Letitia’s literary contacts appear to have been exclusively men. Only now do we find her taken up by literary hostesses. Given her private situation, this was no mean achievement. No respectable lady would consort with a known fallen woman.
Letitia’s first “patroness” was the veteran writer Anne Isabella Spence, who “in those days of leo-hunting was proud to be the first to present to a select circle…the veritable L.E.L., fresh caught for their amusement.” An aging hangover from the days of the eighteenth-century bluestocking, she wore a turban in the manner of Madame de Staël (or at least an approximation of one in gauze and wire) to indicate her literary status and liberal principles. She welcomed the new “English Corinne” into her salon, held regularly in her shabby rooms on the top floor of a tall house in Little Quebec Street, Mayfair.
Miss Spence’s existing “lions” included her near neighbor Lady Caroline Lamb, who used to turn up in an ermine cloak she called her catskin. By then an addled addict, separated from her husband and living under the watchful eye of expensive hired carers, Lady Caroline had been shunned by high society following her indiscreet affair with Byron. Although Miss Spence was not out of the top drawer, Caroline’s desperate family was only too relieved that their black sheep had found a hostess willing to accommodate her. Caroline would soon be dead, aged only forty-two.
Miss Spence was adamant that she invited Lady Caroline on account of her “litr’y abilities,” not her rank. In reality, Caroline’s title was a protecting factor in the eyes of social inferiors, given her notoriety. Her antics with Byron were well known, largely because she herself had done so much to publicize them.
Letitia was as little constrained by sexual morality as Caroline, from whose hands she had received her school prize at seven. But while Miss Spence was indulgent toward the noble lady’s peccadilloes, she would have balked had it been common knowledge that the infant phenomenon L.E.L. was the mother of an illegitimate baby. When rumors belatedly began to circulate, Letitia rightly complained that her lack of “rank” and “opulence” rendered her vulnerable.
Letitia’s first “patroness,” Miss Spence, sporting an approximation of a turban in the manner of Madame de Staël.
Attitudes toward fallen women were hardening. After Shelley’s death in 1822, his wife, Mary, felt able to return to England from Italy only because their union had been ultimately regularized by marriage. It was an advantage to her that their sole surviving child was born in wedlock. In contrast, her unmarried stepsister Claire Clairemont—who had given birth to Byron’s short-lived daughter Allegra and probably to another baby by Shelley—stayed away. Fearing pariah status at home, she wandered in exile through Europe, taking governess jobs as far afield as Russia to make ends meet. In middle age she looked sourly back on her relationships with Byron and Shelley, concluding that sexual liberation only benefited male libertines.
Letitia soon became a fixture in the salon of Miss Spence, and in that of another aging, beturbanned bluestocking, Miss Benger, who also took her up. The literary hangers-on she met there were intrigued by the striking contrast between the tragic melancholy of L.E.L.’s poetry and Miss Landon’s vivacity in company. As one later put it, “the instant L.E.L. was known, the circle around her became disenchanted. She pleaded guilty to no sentiment; she abjured the idea of writing from her own feelings. She was so lively, so girlish…so full of pleasantry, so ready with her shafts of mind, that one felt half-angry with her for being so blithe and real.”
Few were in fact so confident that her social persona was indeed her “real” self. “Witty and conversant as she was,” recalled William Howitt, “you had the feeling that she was playing an assumed part.” No one could be sure which was the true face and which the mask.
There seemed to be two of her. As ever, Letitia was culturally on trend. The dyadic relationship between “Miss Landon” and “L.E.L.” embodied the newfangled concept of the doppelgänger, recently introduced to English readers via R. P. Gillies’s translation of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tale, published the same month as The Improvisatrice.
The frisson of uncertainty generated by her contrasting selves was the key to her charisma, which affected some who met her like a “stroke of electricity, throbbing and exciting.” She created cognitive dissonance. Simultaneously alien and strangely familiar, she was “uncanny” in the Freudian sense: a real-life, textbook exemplar of the return of the repressed. What was repressed in Letitia’s case was the tawdry truth about her sex life, which could never be openly mentioned in polite society.
In her progress through literary London, Letitia cannily played the blithe Miss Landon off the traumatized L.E.L., exploiting society’s willing blindness, and especially the reluctance of ladies to “see” that they were paying court to a strumpet. Being lied to as a child had made her feel worthless. Now she would get her own back by entangling Miss Spence, Miss Benger, et al. in her net. In “the society of her own sex,” Letitia “was very careful how to steer her way.” She took particular pains to cultivate a dour headmaster’s widow “who had such a plethora of character and respectability that she had enough to spare for all Babylon.”
Her new friends included three young women her own age who prized their own respectability and later became her most assiduous and protective memoirists: the recently married Mrs. Katherine Thomson and Mrs. Anna Maria Hall, and the spinsterish Miss Emma Roberts. Although all three later established minor literary careers of their own, they were impressed by Letitia’s larger fame and magnetism when they first met her. After her death, they asserted to a woman that their dear L.E.L. had always been sexually virtuous. Quite how much they privately guessed about her situation at the start, and at what point they realized the full truth, is the great conundrum of these “friendships.” But it is safe to say that Letitia’s capacity for intimacy was compromised by her backstage secret from the start.
Letitia costumed herself for the round of literary parties in keeping with her role as infant genius. She “drest upon an idea,” adopting an extravagantly boho style, with flowers in her hair in the middle of the day. Playing up to her image as an ingenue, she was apparently unaware that her skimpy gown was always falling off her shoulder. Women could put this down to her unselfconscious, childlike innocence. Men could read it as they chose.
With men, she worked her “arch playfulness” to the limits of acceptability. When one moony young gentleman asked her what was on her mind, she replie
d with an “air of merry scorn” that her head was filled with nothing but the latest fashions:
“Oh, I have been puzzling my brain to invent a new sleeve; pray, how do you like it?”
“You never think of such a thing as love, you who have written so [much] poetry upon it?”
“Oh! That is all professional, you know!”
Describing herself as a professional at love could have been taken as tantamount to declaring she was a prostitute.
Letitia’s reference to a “sleeve” was fashion-forward. In March 1824, Ackermann’s Repository hymned the delights of a double sleeve with a “short sleeve made very full and confined to the arm by a band” attached to a “half sleeve” formed of “a row of cornets as a sort of trimming, which sticks out in such a manner as to remind one of the quills of a porcupine.” By the mid-1820s, the “natural” aesthetic of the revolutionary period, with its clinging dresses and liberated tresses, was being superseded by the artifice of the dandy era. Letitia herself would soon be abandoning her boho Cockney style in favor of the exigencies of high fashion, as waists tightened, skirts became stiff triangles, sleeves ballooned, and hair was looped up (often with the addition of false hairpieces) into increasingly bizarre variants of the “Apollo knot.”
Like her contemporary Hans Christian Andersen, she understood the psychology of the emperor’s new clothes, and indeed the literal value of clothes themselves in image terms. Her ever-changing costumes dominate her extant portraits, which also show that her coiffure too underwent repeated and often extreme transformations, though a surviving lock of her dark hair reveals that it was indeed naturally “silken,” fine and flyaway. In the early 1820s, she adopted the informal girlish style known as à l’enfant, in a concerted attempt to play the ingenue: loose ringlets framing the face. In Letitia’s 1831 novel Romance and Reality, a Miss Martin calculatedly affects simplicity as “by a crop curled in the neck à l’enfant.” Around 1826 she had her hair “cut short to curl” (leading, she complained, to the “martyrdom of curls”). She subsequently adopted extravagant versions of the Apollo knot, and then, as more demure early Victorian styles came into view, smoothed it down under a hairband. Such efforts occasioned complaints about bad hair days, as Letitia could not afford an expensive coiffeur.
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