L.E.L.

by Lucasta Miller

  The influence of Desbordes-Valmore on L.E.L. can only be hypothesized on stylistic grounds. However, Letitia was demonstrably au fait with the work of another French poetess, Amable Tastu (1798–1885): she published a verse translation of Tastu’s poem “Les Feuilles de Saule” (“Willow Leaves”) in the Gazette in 1827. Amable Tastu was married to the editor Joseph Tastu, who promoted her career, just as Jerdan promoted Letitia’s. Her choice of the masculine first name “Amable” as a nom de plume presaged Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin’s later adoption of her more famous masculine pen name, George Sand.

  The poetess Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786–1859) on her deathbed, photographed by Nadar. Although a generation older than Letitia, she lived on into the age of photography.

  Sabine “Amable” Tastu, Letitia’s most assiduous companion in Paris

  Madame Tastu was the anonymous author of the admiring piece on L.E.L. in the Revue des deux mondes of 1834. Arguing art for art’s sake, it demanded in typically French fashion that a poet’s private life should be kept off-limits to criticism. Talent, wrote Tastu, did not imply personal virtue any more than it excluded it. Poets should not need a certificate of good conduct. It was only of importance to Miss Landon’s family, and irrelevant to her art, whether she was a woman of honor or not.

  It was a statement of support in the face of the personal gossip that had by now become an integral aspect of Letitia’s public image in England, initially at her own provocation but increasingly to her detriment. In France, on the contrary, “gallantry” was so institutionalized as “to create no remark,” according to Thackeray in his Parisian sketches. He contrasted the English need for “the decency of secrecy” with French sexual attitudes.

  In Paris, Madame Tastu became Letitia’s most assiduous companion. L.E.L.’s prestige abroad was such that she was able to attract the cream of literary society in France—at least those who were in town. It was a disappointment to her that Parisian party season was over, curtailing her networking opportunities. “The soirées are where I should have met all the French littérateurs, but none are being given just now,” she complained to Jerdan on June 30. However, Madame Tastu took her to a friend’s country retreat where one gentleman, in an act of surreal whimsy, “was seized with such a fit of poetry that he wrote some verses in my honour, with a pea-pod on a cabbage leaf.”

  Despite being in Paris in the dead season, Letitia was charmed by the attentions paid to her by Prosper Merimée and Odilon Barrot, received a flattering call from the über-critic Sainte-Beuve, and met Chateaubriand at Madame Recamier’s. The latter was still very beautiful, with exquisite manners, according to Letitia. But the man who impressed her as “the wittiest and most original person” she encountered in Paris was the German poet Heinrich Heine, then a political exile. Having heard she was in town, he wrote to her and then paid her the compliment of a call on June 29.

  In a letter to Jerdan, Letitia rendered her encounter with Heine as a comic vignette. She depicted herself as responding in tongue-tied monosyllables to the German poet’s attempts at small talk:

  He said, “Mademoiselle donc a beaucoup couru les boutiques?” “Mais non.” “A-t-elle été au Jardin des Plantes?” “Mais non.” “Avez-vous été a l’opéra, aux théatres?” “Mais non.” “Peut-etre Mademoiselle aime la promenade?” “Mais non.” “A-t-elle donc apporté beaucoup de livres, ou peut-etre elle écrit?” “Mais non.” At last, in seeming despair, he exclaimed, “Mais Mademoiselle, qu’est que ce donc, qu’elle a fait? “Mais—mais—j’ai regardé par la fenetre.” Was there ever anything si bête?

  Things clearly warmed up enough for Heine to show Letitia his wit and originality. Perhaps his sense of irony was tickled by the parodic aspect of their opening dialogue, its dance of dead-end commonplaces. Both poets’ work reveals their awareness of the tragic absurdity of the social mask.

  Heinrich Heine, the “wittiest and most original person” Letitia encountered in Paris in 1834. Portrait by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, 1831.

  In humorously depicting her supposed social ineptitude with Heine, Letitia told Jerdan, “you know it takes a long time with me to get over the shame of speaking to a stranger by way of conversation.” Despite her reputation as a society wit, she remained underneath as insecure as the tongue-tied little girl in “The History of a Child.” “I have seen a good many strangers, and it would take a quire of paper to detail all the little agonies I have suffered from them, all the little ‘states’ that I have been in,” she told an unnamed “intimate and valued friend” in another letter from Paris, quoted in Blanchard’s biography.

  “Though all my life I have lived in society, and had to make my own way, I never got accustomed to doing it,” she went on. “I am unconquerably irresolute and shy. The utmost I can do, and that by force of long habit, is to conceal my embarrassment, and to feel it, for that very concealment, all the more.” With Heine, she transformed her very shyness into a mannered performance, neutralizing her anxiety by projecting it into play-acting. She could only express her vulnerabilities by transforming them into masquerade.

  Letitia told Heine that she had not yet been to the theater, but that state of affairs was soon remedied when the solicitous editor of the Revue des deux mondes got her a box to see the risqué opera-ballet The Temptation of St. Anthony (“which said temptation is the being made love to by a very beautiful woman, created by his Satanic majesty for that very purpose”). At the theater she was introduced to a handsome young poet, Antoine Fontaney. She told her unnamed correspondent that he answered very well to her beau idéal of the French genius: “pale, dark, sombre, and with a sort of enthusiasm of which we have no idea in England….His conversation is very intellectual, and very spirited—or let me use the French word, ‘spirituel.’ ”

  Although still yoked familially to Jerdan, Letitia was eager to flirt with younger men. She was getting her own back for Louisa Costello, Mary Ann Browne, and whatever casual sexual couplings Jerdan pursued. Fontaney, however, was not interested. He was in fact smitten with an adolescent girl half Letitia’s age, Gabrielle, the daughter of the famous French actress Marie Dorval. They went on to elope to London, to the distress of Madame Dorval, who would have preferred her daughter to have made a more advantageous match. The couple both ended up dying of consumption in a garret in true La Bohème style.

  Despite her interest in the handsome Fontaney, Letitia’s comments on French poetry matched the hypocrisy of English society. “As far as I can judge,” she wrote, “it is full of novelty, vivid conceptions, and I must say, genius, but what we should call blasphemous and indelicate to the last degree.” Though in reality a fallen woman, she cleaved to English social norms, even when they restricted her freedom. She complained that “of course it is impossible for me to go out by myself, or accept the attendance of a gentleman alone, so that I am surrounded with all sorts of little difficulties and embarrassments.”

  By 1834, Letitia’s contemporary George Sand (born 1804) had left her husband and embarked on her famous period of Romantic rebellion in Paris, where she threw off the shackles of marriage to become a writer, commit adultery, and tramp the streets alone in men’s clothes. Her first foray into fiction was cowritten with her first lover, Jules Sandeau, just as Letitia created L.E.L. in partnership with Jerdan. However, she soon left him for a string of other sexual partners of both sexes, including Chopin and Marie Dorval.

  Both Sand and L.E.L. based their literary voices on their treatment of thwarted female passion, “love dashing her head blindly against all the obstacles of civilisation,” as Sand put it in the 1832 preface to her novel Indiana. They had much in common: sexual transgression; a “fatal facility” for producing page after page; a public personality cult to manage; a lack of faith in the feminist political project. However, Sand pursued her career with a ruthless independence Letitia lacked. By the time she died, of old age in 1876, she was a nation
al treasure.

  Sand’s aristocratic background, and the fact that she had been married before she rebelled sexually, bolstered her sense of entitlement. She was a twenty-six-year-old escapee wife by the time her first work was published jointly with Sandeau, whom she soon jettisoned once his usefulness had been exhausted. In contrast, Letitia, who began writing for the Gazette as a teenager, remained tied to Jerdan, who had taken her virginity, long after he ceased to be valuable as a springboard.

  “George Sand” at ease in her role as a betrousered, smoking rebel in the 1840s

  French mores were also more accommodating to the “femme libre” than was English society. They continued to be so long into the nineteenth century. Colette (born 1873) began her literary career in a situation not dissimilar to that of the young Letitia. When her family was in reduced circumstances, she was married off at twenty to the rakish publisher and writer Willy. He flagrantly exploited her talents, reputedly locking her in a room to make her write her Claudine books, which he initially published under his own name. The novels’ combination of naiveté and sexual sophistication titillated the public in much the same way as L.E.L.’s early poetry.

  Like Sand, Colette ultimately felt powerful enough to assert her autonomy and split from her Svengali. Having left Willy, she went scandalously on the stage, and pursued a string of other lovers, while tirelessly promoting her own career. When Colette died in 1954, she was given a state funeral. Had Letitia been French, she might have ended up in the literary canon, accepted as a female bohemian like Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, George Sand, and Colette.

  A young Colette with Willy, c. 1890s. Unlike Letitia, she first married her Svengali and then left him to pursue her career solo.

  On the evidence of her letters to Jerdan, Letitia’s French trip was not altogether happy. She frequently complained to him of languor and fatigue, and, on one occasion, of being so unsteady on her feet that she kept falling over on the slippery parquet, hurting her arm. Meals were ordered in from the nearby Café de Paris. Letitia enthusiastically told Mrs. Hall that she was “making an experimental voyage through the carte,” having a different dish every day. But she admitted to Jerdan that she had no appetite: “I am obliged to force a little down: ice is the only thing I enjoy.”

  Letitia’s letter to Jerdan of June 30 offered a litany of complaints, numbered from one to six: too many Parisians were out of town; the lack of a gentleman chaperone restricted her movements; her planned stay was too short to make proper acquaintances; her companion Miss Turing knew nothing of French customs and was only interested in seeing “the dresses, shops etc.” “Fifthly,” she went on, “one ought to be married; and sixthly I wish myself at home again.” The penultimate grumble, slipped in surreptitiously, leaps out.

  The codes that governed the sexual behavior of women were nuanced, but the status of the unmarried mistress was the most perilous. A woman who lost her virginity out of wedlock could wipe out the stigma by marrying her deflowerer, as does Jane Austen’s Lydia Bennett. In Letitia’s own circle, sex before marriage was not unknown. Rosina Wheeler slept with Edward Bulwer before their wedding, perhaps to inveigle him into marrying her (she later accused him of having pressured her into anal sex, an activity “which women cannot tell even to their lawyers”).

  Even a mistress from the demimonde could aim at social acceptability by marrying her lover, although it was often a vain hope. Hyacinthe Roland eventually married the Earl of Mornington at St. George’s Hanover Square in 1794, but she was miserable in London because no one would visit her. Lady Caroline Lamb was particularly warned by her mother against acknowledging Hyacinthe in society.

  Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, George Sand, and Colette had a double advantage. Not only were they French, but all three had been married before embarking on their adventurous literary and sexual careers. Letitia, in contrast, was English and had become a mistress without ever having been a wife and with little hope of ever marrying her lover.

  Could Letitia’s relationship with Jerdan have worked out differently? At a time when divorce in England required an act of Parliament, and was restricted to a tiny minority of the very rich and well connected, far more unmarried couples from lesser backgrounds cohabited informally than one might assume. The life of the Victorian “sensation” novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915) offers an intriguing counterfactual parallel to Letitia’s story.

  A generation younger than L.E.L., Braddon went through a similar family crisis in her teens when her solicitor father suffered financial ruin and her parents’ marriage broke up. She briefly went on the provincial stage under a pseudonym and found the protection of an older man, before embarking on a career-enhancing relationship with the publisher John Maxwell, who encouraged her literary talents and became her lover.

  Like Jerdan, he was older and married. However, his wife was safely out of the way in a mental institution in Ireland. Braddon quietly moved in with him, gave birth to six children, and succeeded in passing as his wife in society, while simultaneously achieving wild commercial literary success as “Miss Braddon.” They finally married in 1874, after the first Mrs. Maxwell’s death, by which time Mary Elizabeth Braddon had become both rich and respected as a result of her literary endeavors. In her later years, she was even presented to Queen Victoria.

  In contrast to Miss Braddon, whose works were written in the third person and who kept herself out of the public eye, Letitia’s literary celebrity had been tied to her confessional voice and Byronic aura of personal scandal from early on. By the time she had been hyped as the “English improvisatrice” and paraded in salons by Jerdan as his “ward,” the couple could not have quietly settled down in a discreet ménage, fudging over the fact that he was already married. More important, there is no sign that he ever wanted to leave his wife, Frances, during the 1820s. She clearly performed adequately to his needs as the mother of his legitimate children and as the chatelaine of Grove House.

  Yet although Letitia did not have the respectability of marriage, or a husband to squire her about Paris, she still felt she could count on the security of Jerdan’s protection. He might not have written as often as she would have liked. But for her return journey from France, in the last week of July, he offered to meet her at Boulogne to provide her with the gentlemanly escort she complained she had not had throughout her stay.

  We cannot know whether he went through with the offer, but we do know that a mishap occurred on the journey home. In Paris, Letitia had bought Jerdan an expensive fancy waistcoat. In order to avoid paying duty on it, she put it on under her clothes. However, the offending item was revealed when she was strip-searched by a suspicious female customs officer at Dover. The urge to symbolize their illicit relationship had become part of the fabric of her everyday life. The couple collude to cheat the system, but it is she who is ultimately exposed, blamed, and humiliated.

  Perhaps the gift was a means of ingratiating herself with Jerdan to secure his wavering commitment. As the “L.E.L.” brand declined, so did his interest. Letitia had to nag him from Paris to look over the manuscript of her novel in progress, Francesca Carrara. When it was published in November 1834, the three magical letters had so lost value that they did not even appear on the title page. It was marketed as “by the author of Romance and Reality, The Venetian Bracelet etc.”

  Letitia had made her name as a poet with stylized portrayals of emotionally starved and voracious women. In real life, Jerdan increasingly regarded her as cumbersomely needy and fragile. When he quoted her Paris letters in his autobiography, years later, he made a point of commenting on her “excess of feminine timidity” and “long[ing] for protection.” Clearly, that protection was beyond what he was prepared to give.

  One problem was that Letitia came with Whittington attached. We cannot trace their sibling dependency as adults in any detail, as little relevant correspondence remains extant. However, a survivin
g letter from Whittington to Jerdan, written on July 14, 1834, when Letitia was still in France, reveals that he continued to regard his sister’s protector as his meal ticket, despite being shunted off to a Devon curacy in 1831. Whittington announces that it is of “vital consequence” that Jerdan clear a £15 debt of his at Drummond’s bank, promising that this shall be the last time he duns him for money, and insisting unconvincingly, in the voice of a prodigal son, that he has “done all I could for the last three years to recover former errors and faults.”

  Jerdan later described Whittington as a clever young man, who could have done as much as his sister in literature, but instead reserved his talents for penning comic epigrams designed to persuade his host to bring out another bottle. Mrs. Bray, the wife of the Devon vicar to whom Whittington was curate, thought him “a character of no ordinary cast,” whose “superior talents” had been “cultivated…by the opportunity of mingling much in the literary circles of London.” She was herself an aspirant writer who, like so many others, valued Jerdan’s patronage.

  By Christmas 1834, Letitia was feeling neglected by Jerdan, even though she was still producing copy for his Gazette. In December, while staying at Aberford with her uncle James, she sent him some German poetry translations for the magazine. But she complained crossly that he had failed to give sufficient review space to a new volume of sermons just published by her brother. Letitia particularly singled out for approval Whittington’s sermon against “drunkenness.”