Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838)

Although popular in her own time, Letitia Elizabeth Landon's work has mostly slipped into obscurity. Two of her admiring contemporaries, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti, wrote memorial poems in her honor after her untimely early death. Letitia was born in Chelsea, London, and educated there until 1815, when she moved with her family to Old Brompton. Her first poem, "Rome" was published under the initial pseudonym "L" in The Literary Gazette in 1820. Letitia Landon continued writing to help support her widowed mother, and produced further sentimental verses. Her first novel was Romance and Reality (1831) but she did not achieve real literary recognition until the publication of her second novel in 1837. Most of her work was published under the initials ‘"L.E.L." including some published posthumously. After suffering a broken romance, in 1838 she married George Maclean, governor of the British trading post of Cape Coast (now Ghana), and accompanied him to West Africa. Soon after her arrival there, she died suddenly from an overdose of medication she was taking.