Romance and Reality

The Author

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (14 August 1802 – 15 October 1838), English poet and novelist, better known by her initials L. E. L. She was the daughter of an army-agent. The early loss of her father, and the early manifestation of a talent, brought her before the world while yet a girl, as an enthusiastic and constant literary laborer. Bulwer Lytton wrote that, as a young college student, he and his classmates would rush every Saturday afternoon for the 'Literary Gazette, with an impatient anxiety to hasten at once to that corner of the sheet which contained the three magical letters L.E.L. And all of us praised the verse, and all of us guessed at the author. We soon learned it was a female, and our admiration was doubled, and our conjectures tripled. In 1831 she published her first novel, Romance and Reality. Besides her poetry, Miss Landon's three novels―'Romance and Reality,' 'Francesco, Carrara,' and ' Ethel Churchill,' remain to attest her powers as a prose writer. They are all of them stories of sentiment. In October 1836, Landon met George Maclean, governor of the Gold Coast at a dinner party, and the two began a relationship. He and Landon were married on 7 June 1838. The marriage was kept secret, and Landon spent the first month of it living with friends. In early July, the couple sailed for Cape Coast, where they arrived on 16 August. Two months later, on 15 October, Landon was found dead, a bottle of prussic acid in her hand.


Contemporary Review

The Author of these volumes is a lady of remarkable genius. We remember well when she first appeared before the public in the pages of "The Literary Gazette." The talent to delineate character, and the talent to deduce observation from the portrait, are wholly distinct. In the one lies Scott's genius; in the other, Godwin's. In the latter faculty, Miss Landon is the more especially felicitous. The whole work abounds with passages of equal eloquence and truth―in aphorisms of pointed originality, in descriptions adorned by a singular richness and power of diction. The reader must fly to the book itself; and if he read it once for the story, he must read it twice for the wit and the eloquence, for the style, the reflections, and the moral. Miss Landon's prose contains the witness of some faculties not visible in her poetry―acute liveliness, and playful, yet deep observation. - The New monthly magazine, December, 1831