Lewes’s early novels embrace the theme of the writer’s career in the uncertain world of the literary marketplace, following in the footsteps of L.E.L.’s Ethel Churchill and Balzac’s Lost Illusions. He was so fascinated by Letitia as an emblem of the literary trade that in his first novel, Ranthorpe (1847), he made the hero, an aspirant poet, live in lodgings in Hans Place. Rose, Blanche and Violet, his next novel, was published in 1848. However, its action begins in 1835. It was an attempt by the young Lewes to show his in-crowd credentials by revealing his cognizance of the seamy side of 1830s literary London.
Like Letitia’s, the career of Lewes’s fictional poetess Hester Mason is kick-started when she becomes the mistress of an older married man. She “falls with her eyes open.” Like Letitia, she writes with a “fatal facility,” and her poetry is “daring and extravagant.” “Doesn’t it strike you as wery stwange,” says a character with a Dickensian speech impediment, “that a young woman should wite in such twemendous misery? Nothing but seductions, delusions, bwroken hearts, pwoswrated spirits, agonies of wemorse, tewible pwedictions, wetched weveries, and all that sort of thing!”
Hester announces herself as a disciple of Wollstonecraftian free love, as, frustrated by her aging protector, she attempts to engage the sympathies of a young male writer. She flips open her negligee to reveal her magnificent bust, but he makes his excuses and leaves. Her work does not sell as well as she hopes. She is plagued by the difficulty of finding ladies willing to attend her London salons. She ends up a streetwalker on Piccadilly Circus, a crude metaphor by Lewes for the prostitution of talent.
When G. H. Lewes met Charlotte Brontë in London in 1850 at a lunch given by the publisher George Smith, he enraged her by intimating that they had something in common, as they had both written so-called naughty books. His was Rose, Blanche and Violet; hers was Jane Eyre. Given that Lewes’s novel contained a portrait of an ambitious woman writer who comes to London from the provinces only to become a prostitute, it is hardly surprising that the nervous, though best-selling, Yorkshirewoman was displeased.
Charlotte had read Rose, Blanche and Violet not long after it came out. She had been particularly struck by the character of Hester. “He gives no charming picture of London Literary Society, and especially the female part of it,” she wrote to William Smith Williams, her publisher’s assistant, who supplied her with a steady stream of the latest books. When Williams hinted that Hester’s tawdry story was based on a real-life model, Charlotte told him, “I never for a moment doubted the whole dreary picture was from the life.” It is hard to tell whether or not she explicitly connected Hester Mason’s story with that of L.E.L., the poetess whose work had inspired her in her youth, and about whom Fraser’s had made so many ribald remarks. But reading Lewes’s novel certainly increased her awareness of the opprobrium attached to women who wrote about passion in a confessional female voice, as she herself had done in Jane Eyre, which she had published under the pseudonym Currer Bell because she believed that critics were prejudiced against women writers.
Despite being a runaway success, Jane Eyre was a controversial book in its day. The male nom de plume fooled no one, because of the intensity of its first-person female voice. Its tortured romantic plot and, especially, the abrasive passion of the heroine led to it being attacked by critics as unfeminine, coarse, and immoral.
When Charlotte finally made her identity known and visited London as an acknowledged author, she found herself constantly at the mercy of male mockery, and not just that of Lewes. The Fraserian Thackeray thrust a phallic cigar in her face and asked her insinuatingly whether she knew its significance. He treated the Yorkshire parson’s daughter to the sort of banter that had not long before been L.E.L.’s daily diet. An embarrassed Charlotte put up the shutters.
London critics did not, as was once assumed, turn on Jane Eyre because it was unheard-of for a woman to write about love in the first person, but rather because it was an only too well-trodden path that had ultimately led Letitia Landon to Cape Coast. They read the original title Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (the subtitle was chosen not by Charlotte but by her publisher) as a calculated “puff mysterious,” assimilating it into the scandalous tradition of publicity-hungry semiconfession that L.E.L. had embodied. In fact, Charlotte and her sisters adopted pseudonyms because they sincerely wanted to walk invisible, as Charlotte put it. However, as provincials they were out of touch with metropolitan literary culture and did not fully appreciate how discredited the discourse of female Byronism had become in London by the late 1840s.
Jane Eyre, first published in 1847, bears the imprint of L.E.L. in its first-person confessional voice, in its gothic extremes, in its love triangle plot, and in its emphasis on sadomasochistic romantic passion. What it does not share is L.E.L.’s fatalistic pessimism, mannered narcissism, and self-irony. In contrast, it is about as authentic as literature ever gets. As such, it resists as much as it draws on the model offered by L.E.L. Jane refuses to become Rochester’s mistress and consistently stands up for herself. She becomes a character with an inner life and moral integrity, qualities alien to L.E.L.’s play of masquerade.
Charlotte Brontë’s use of the confessional first person, and her choice of love as her prime subject, did not endear her to her fellow women writers, who were striving to detach themselves from the image of female genius promulgated by L.E.L. The hyperrational Harriet Martineau—who had been portrayed by Fraser’s as a witch, and who had gone on to express concern over Letitia’s depressed demeanor shortly before the latter left for Cape Coast—wrote Charlotte a stiff letter after she published her searingly confessional novel Villette in 1853. Although Martineau did not know the details, the novel was indeed based on Charlotte’s real-life unrequited passion for her mentor Constantin Heger, who had taught her in Brussels in the early 1840s. Martineau objected to its focus on frustrated female desire, and feared that Brontë was not only exposing herself but giving women writers per se a bad name.
Amazingly, the scandals surrounding L.E.L. were sufficiently suppressed outside the in-crowd that she remained an aspirational figure for young women writers into the 1840s. In 1847, the same year as Jane Eyre appeared, L.E.L. was frequently name-checked in admiring tones by a naïve first-time novelist, Rose Ellen Hendricks, in The Young Authoress. Hendricks’s unsophisticated and deservedly forgotten novel projects a starry-eyed vision. It promotes the unrealistic notion that literary fame will set a woman on the path to true love and eventually reward her with a perfect marriage.
Charlotte Brontë was both more talented and more conflicted than Rose Hendricks. The daughter of an Irish Tory, she had been schooled in her youth by Blackwood’s and Fraser’s, imbibing their misogyny from an early age, yet wanting to assert herself in writing like the female authors of the annuals. At twenty, Brontë wrote to the poet laureate Robert Southey, confessing her desire to be “for ever known” as a poetess. Southey acknowledged her talent, but counseled her against putting too much value on “celebrity” in a letter that has often been read over-reductively as an act of simple male sabotage. As his comments on Lucretia Davidson show, Southey was genuinely concerned about the way in which the dominant culture schooled ambitious girl writers into a desperate need for external approval that could eat away at their self-esteem. In the long run, Southey’s warnings enabled Charlotte to make art out of her conflicted position as a female outsider.
However, the first-person voice she created in Jane Eyre and Villette did not become the norm among Victorian women writers. It was too dangerous. Katherine Thomson’s stepniece Elizabeth Gaskell, who published under her respectable married title “Mrs. Gaskell,” eschewed it in her philanthropic, social conscience, third-person fiction. Mary Anne Evans, a.k.a. George Eliot, also adopted a third-person aesthetic. As she was privately living in sin with G. H. Lewes by the time she began publishing fiction, she could only assert her moral authority by publishing her novels under a male pseu
donym. Her masterpiece The Mill on the Floss, based on her childhood memories, suggests that she would have been an astonishing first-person confessional writer. But she knew that a third-person perspective was essential if she was to achieve her goal of being accepted alongside men as a serious author. Following the scandalous death of L.E.L., the female “I” became unpalatable.
By making L.E.L. the loathsome Rosamond Vincy’s favorite writer, Eliot detached herself from the literary culture in which she herself had in fact first made her way. Her early career as Marian Evans was not in reality that dissimilar to that of Letitia Landon. Indeed, she narrowly avoided a similar fate when she came to London from the provinces in 1850, long before she began to publish as “George Eliot.”
On arriving in the metropolis, she ensconced herself in the household of the publisher John Chapman, located in the Strand, not far from the offices of the Literary Gazette. A Jerdan-like figure, he already had both a wife and a mistress on site. Nevertheless, he went on to seduce the young Marian, to the annoyance of both the other women in his life, a fact that only surfaced after Chapman’s private diaries turned up in a bookstall in the twentieth century.
Luckily for Marian, she did not become pregnant. Chapman moreover did not think her pretty enough for it to be worth his while to continue pursuing her, given the reaction of his wife and mistress, who joined forces to eject the newcomer. But Chapman was so convinced of Marian’s intellectual value that he persuaded her to come back to act as de facto editor of the Westminster Review, which he had recently acquired. She agreed to do so, gratis. Like L.E.L., she began her career as the unpaid intern of a libertine editor who was her inferior in talent.
George Eliot, aged thirty-nine in 1858. As a young woman in her twenties she had been in the thrall of the editor John Chapman, a Jerdan-like figure. She went on to express her disapproval of L.E.L. in Middlemarch (1871–72).
In G. H. Lewes, Marian subsequently found a male muse who was prepared to subordinate himself to her career, although they could not marry, as he and his wife were not able to divorce under the restrictive laws of the time, since he was held to have condoned his wife’s adultery with Leigh Hunt’s son. Sexual bohemianism continued in literary London into the Victorian age but under discreeter rules. Unlike Letitia, George Eliot kept herself offstage and under wraps.
Nevertheless, female poets continued to regard L.E.L. as a necessary touchstone into the Victorian age. Elizabeth Barrett (later Browning), the one scion of the “poetess” tradition who remains a famous name today, acknowledged L.E.L.’s influence. Although she was only four years younger than Letitia, her talent was comparatively slow-burning; she only came to public prominence in her thirties with the publication of her Poems in 1844. Yet she had followed L.E.L.’s work since the 1820s. Stuck in her invalid’s retreat in Wimpole Street, she seized on whatever gossip came her way via visitors such as Mary Russell Mitford and L.E.L.’s onetime enemy H. F. Chorley.
Distressed by the news of Letitia’s death, Miss Barrett instantly wrote a tribute, “L.E.L.’s Last Question,” which Chorley published in The Athenaeum. Inspired by the latter’s shipboard poem, with its equivocal refrain to her absent “friends” (“do you think of me as I think of you?”), it portrayed L.E.L. as an incarnation of loneliness despite her fame, a woman for whom sympathy came too late, whose poetic obsession with “love” was a cruel irony, and whose “inward oracle” should have been God:
Hers was the hand that played for many a year
Love’s silver phrase for England,—smooth and well!
Would God, her heart’s more inward oracle
In that lone moment, might confirm her dear!
For when her questioned friends in agony
Made passionate response,—“We think of thee”—
Her place was in the dust, too deep to hear.
“I fancy it would have worked out better—had it been worked out—with the right moral & intellectual influences in application,” wrote Elizabeth Barrett in the wake of L.E.L.’s death. Barrett acknowledged her “raw bare powers,” but she failed to register the extent to which L.E.L. was a knowing chronicler of her own complicity.
L.E.L. later became the inspiration behind Barrett’s verse novel Aurora Leigh, published in 1857, “an autobiography of a poetess—(not me).” Like L.E.L.’s Improvisatrice, her heroine Aurora is from Florence, although of English parentage and living in the present day. Filled with idealistic literary ambition and a spirit of independence, she rejects an offer of marriage from her rich cousin Romney and instead goes to London to live alone and make her living by her pen. There she occupies an attic like Letitia’s at Hans Place, and finds a commercial readership for her romantic verses. Yet she becomes hollowed out by the demands of the marketplace, as she turns out poem after poem to feed the superficial demands of publishers.
Romney meanwhile becomes a fervent evangelical, devoting himself to Bible study and social work. He rescues a working-class prostitute, Marian Erle, whom he plans to marry in an act of Christian charity. In Aurora and Marian, Barrett splits off the two sides of Letitia into separate characters: the professional authoress and the sexually exploited woman. In the end, Marian selflessly sets Romney free from their engagement so that he can marry Aurora. On marriage, the latter stops writing to please the market, and instead devotes herself to becoming a “true” poet whose work will explore serious matters of spirituality. She thus becomes a real Victorian and redeems the figure of the poetess from the sleazy past of L.E.L.
The irony is that the only way Barrett can make that happen is by removing Aurora’s need to make a living. Romney’s wealth enables her to sidestep the cash nexus in her quest to write meaningful poetry. In this, she presages the view of Virginia Woolf, who asserted that a woman must have not just a room of her own, but money of her own, in order to write fiction.
Another poetess, Emily Brontë, who was sixteen years Letitia’s junior, cut herself idealistically off from the world. Never making a penny from her writing in her lifetime, she lived as a recluse in Haworth, supported by her family, only venturing out when forced. She summed up her attitude in her now famous poem “The Old Stoic,” first published in 1846:
Riches I hold in light esteem
And Love I laugh to scorn
And lust of Fame was but a dream
That vanished in the morn—
And if I pray, the only prayer
That moves my lips for me
Is—“Leave the heart that now I bear
And give me liberty.”
Riches, Love, and Fame—money, sex, and celebrity—had been the leitmotifs of Letitia Landon’s career. The reclusive Emily, in contrast, only agreed to publication, under a pseudonym and at her family’s own expense, after days of pressure from her more ambitious sister Charlotte.
L.E.L. continued to haunt the imaginations of women writers into the 1860s, even though by then the plates for The Improvisatrice had been melted down. Christina Rossetti—whose father, Gabriele, gave popular lectures on Italian literary culture in London the 1820s, and whose artist brother Dante Gabriel later praised Maclise’s hyperfeminized portrait of L.E.L.—imagined Letitia as an outcast, “whose heart was breaking for a little love.” Rossetti’s poem “L.E.L.” is an act of religious wish fulfillment. Letitia had been a Shelleyan atheist in her youth, but Christina Rossetti imagines her finding peace and trust in Christian faith and with God. The full implications only come to the surface in context. Christina, who worked in a refuge home for former prostitutes, is imaging Landon as a fallen woman:
Yet saith a saint: “Take patience for thy scythe”;
Yet saith an angel: “Wait, for thou shalt prove
Time best is last, true life is born of death.
O thou, heart-broken for a little love!
Then love shall fill thy girth,
And love makes fat thy dearth,
When new spring builds new heaven and clean new earth.”
Christina Rossetti, drawn by her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1866. In her poem on L.E.L., she imagined her as an outcast.
Soon after writing “L.E.L.,” Christina Rossetti composed her more famous poem “Goblin Market,” whose sexualized imagery of flowers, fruits, and their juices were surely employed with less blind unconsciousness than some modern critics have assumed. They harked back to the young L.E.L.’s use of Della Cruscan erotic symbolism. However, Rossetti redeployed the technique in the service of a moral fable exposing the dangers of narcissism and self-indulgence.
In contrast, among male writers, L.E.L.’s Della Cruscan influence worked its way through early Tennyson to the more deviant Swinburne, who in his private life sought sexual excitement through pain. Obsessed with flogging, he constructed a sensual poetic universe in which sound trumped sense, and sadomasochism was represented via floral imagery, the “raptures and roses of vice,” as he put it in his hymn to Dolores, the lady of pain. An echo of “Letitia Landon” might just be detectable in the title of his posthumously published pornographic novel Lesbia Brandon, although the heroine’s interests are more Sapphic in the modern sense.
In the later nineteenth century, L.E.L.’s post–Della Cruscan sensibility most notably survived in the writings of underground gay poets, who used her buzzword “shame” as a code word for the “love that dare not speak its name” and were equally addicted to floral euphemisms, although they tended to prefer the symbolism of hyacinths and narcissi to that of rosebuds and lilies. Their shadowy position in society was similar to Letitia’s as a semi-acknowledged fallen woman. Her subversive performativity, which exposed sexual identity as built on artifice, became grist to their mill.
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