L.E.L.

Riveting… A thorough, engaging, and even loving restoration of a woman writer whose story needed to be told and whose works required fresh, attentive eyes.

Kirkus Reviews

Miller crafts a fascinating narrative that is as much about the volatile ways in which gender intersects with cultural practices, including drug addiction, sexuality, colonialism, and creativity, as it is about her provocative subject, Letitia Elizabeth Landon.

Emily Bowles, Library Journal

A sirenic, ultramodern biography. Miller’s sleuth-scholar storytelling engages an inventive tone to unravel hidden, seismic-secrets of the nineteenth-century London literary landscape.

Yvonne Conza, Electric Literature

A fascinating portrait of a woman and her times and a heartbreaking song of the fickleness of love and fame.

Economist

A valiant recovery job – the life of a writer, a woman first celebrated, then notorious, in her time and nearly forgotten today... [An] infinitely rich literary biography.

Katharine Powers, Wall Street Journal

L.E.L. is the first biography of Landon to explore recent revelations about her life, and the literary critic Lucasta Miller's sleuthing delivers an unexpected result. The figure who emerges from her pages is not just a missing link in literary Romanticism, but a progenitor of something modern.

Nicholas Dames, Atlantic

Wonderfully entertaining... Spellbinding.

New York Times Book Review

Ingenious.

New Yorker

Miller resurrects the all-but-forgotten life and once radiant career of Letitia Elizabeth Landon... A compelling examination of an unjustly marginalized literary life.

Booklist

Textured and lively... Miller's biography vividly restores a forgotten author and her faded world, that of the 'strange pause' between the Romantics and the Victorians.

Publishers Weekly

Miller explores the seedy underbelly of the era with panache… Miller’s definitive biography restores to life a poet who influenced writers such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti and Charlotte Bronte.

Paula Byrne, The Times

In her biography of L.E.L., Lucasta Miller's stellar research blows two centuries of accumulated dust off a phenomenon worth unearthing... This book takes biography to a new level.

Lyndall Gordon, New Statesman

Compelling as a detective story, Miller’s revelatory life of Landon is a masterpiece of eloquent scholarship... Miller's real genius lies in her forensic ability to disentangle reality from romance... splendid.

Miranda Seymour, Literary Review

Gripping… with meticulous, precise research.

John Carey, Sunday Times

A searching biography that uses historical detective work to address the riddle of a brilliant poet’s dramatic early death… L.E.L. offers a vivid, if often bleak, picture of the life and times of an extraordinary woman. Miller handles the complex story of Landon’s life with the pace and skill of a novelist, and her book should fascinate anyone interested in the history of British women’s writing, or anyone who has ever looked at histories of Romantic and Victorian literature and wondered what, exactly, happened in the gap between the two.

Joe Crawford, BBC History Magazine

In a brilliant work of literary resuscitation, Lucasta Miller explores Landon’s forgotten poetry and vigorously challenges the legacy of "lies and evasions" surrounding her… brilliantly informative.

Claire Harman, Evening Standard

A terrific book... A compelling life of the victim of a misogynist celebrity culture, a rich mix of literary criticism and impeccable research, which reads like a novel - you keep turning the pages to discover whatever will happen next to the unfortunate L.E.L..

Jane Ridley, Daily Telegraph

This is biography as liberation, in which a woman's story is allowed to stand on its own terms. It its firmly in the within a tradition of seminal accounts of complex women – Claire Tomalin's The Invisible Woman, Amanda Foreman's Georgiana, Lucasta Miller's own Brontë Myth – in which the power of the genre to bear witness to the complexity of women's lives is everywhere apparent.

Daisy Hay, Times Literary Supplement

Boldly original... sharp-eyed.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Spectator

Miller is a brilliant explicator of the troubled trail of fact and fiction that biography leaves in its wake... a fierce and enthralling book.

New York Review of Books

Excellent... should become required reading.

Oldie

An energetic, fascinating and deeply researched book… Miller’s skill is to address and capture the transient nature of Landon’s fame… to retrieve [Landon] from history’s doldrums, and demolish the mocking which continued for decades.

Catherine Taylor, Financial Times

Miller wants us to see L.E.L. less as a great poet... and more as an interesting "foremother" of today’s performative culture… [you] will come away from Miller’s excellent biography understanding why she matters.

Kathryn Hughes, Guardian

A compelling book.

The Week, *Book of the Week*

Terrific… Miller expertly decodes the story of her life and loves from poems, and the book reads like a novel.

Jane Ridley, Tablet, *Summer reads of 2019*

Sensational material brought expertly to life; but Miller’s real gift to the reader is her patient reconstruction of the "lost literary generation" 1820s and 1830s.

Claire Lowdon, Sunday Times, *Books of the Year*

Lucasta Miller's fine literary detective work yields a riveting, tantalisingly ambiguous portrait of a poet whose confessional voice and savvy celebrity make her only more intriguing to modern readers.

Hephzibah Anderson, Observer

A riveting, tantalisingly ambiguous portrait of a poet whose confessional voice makes her only more intriguing to modern readers.

Hephzibah Anderson, Observer