The work of ?L.E.L.? began to be published when she was only seventeen, and in her early twenties Landon had already achieved considerable renown. As a widely envied independent woman in London society, however, she was increasingly the subject of scandalous gossip. Eventually she married the governor of a colony in West Africa, and died under mysterious circumstances soon after arriving in Africa, aged thirty-six. Landon?s life contributed very largely to the nineteenth-century archetype of the poet as a breed apart, heroic but doomed. Her poetry, however, was until very recently largely forgotten; this is the first twentieth-century edition of her poems, which the editors describe as ?cold and sentimental at the same time, flat and intense.?

In addition to a broad selection of Landon?s poetry and prose, this volume also includes a wide variety of contextual materials and a comprehensive bibliography.