Description
Book SynopsisThis is a double biography of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, best-selling Regency poet known to her contemporaries as 'the female Byron', and her husband George Maclean, British administrator on the Gold Coast, known as the Father of Modern Ghana. L.E.L.'s reading public adored her writing and poetry and made her the best-selling female author of her time. As an early media celebrity her life was the subject of society gossip, so her sudden death in Africa shocked the nation (a 'melancholy catastrophe' ran one headline) and led to rumours of suicide or murder. Her husband's name was henceforth blackened by London society, which unwittingly superimposed the plots of L.E.L.'s fictions upon the circumstances of her death. Despite the fact that Maclean cleared 200 miles of Western African coast of British slave trading, made peace with the warlike Asante, instituted a judicial system still in use in many African democracies, and encouraged successful and fair trading, the scandal unjustly ruined his career. According to the inquest L.E.L.''s death was caused by her improper use of a prescribed medicine, but the rumour mongers discounted the difficult circumstances of life on the Gold Coast in the mid 1800s, and hinted that "Mrs Maclean, only recently married, owed her death to the revengeful passions of the natives, who poisoned the wife in order to have vengeance on the husband". Among those who enjoyed her work or recognised her influence were Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti and her brother, Dante Gabriel. It might be said that, to reflect fully the aesthetics of early nineteenth-century poetry, one has to consider, together, the works of William Wordsworth, Felicia Hemans, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon.
Trade Review"It is not only the most important publication on L.E.L. since Cynthia Lawford's news, but also a tour de force on the cultural turmoils of Great Britain...A storehouse of valuable research and superbly coordinated information, Poisoned Lives is also a lively, literate, engaging story, rendered with the craft and flair of an artful novelist." - Susan J. Wolfson, Princeton University, The Wordsworth Circle, Volume XLII, Number 4, Autumn 2011
Table of ContentsPrologue; The End; Letty: Childhood; George: Childhood; Letitia: Starting Out; George: Starting Out; Letitia: Making a Name; George: Making a Name; Letitia: Changing Tack; George: Changing Tack; Letitia: Coming Together; George: Coming Together; Together; Death at the Castle; The Inquest; The Affair of the Dos Amigos; The Commission of Inquiry; Bibliography; Index.
