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Poisoned Lives - The Regency Poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon (LEL) and British Gold Coast Administrator George Maclean (Hardcover, New)
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Poisoned Lives - The Regency Poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon (LEL) and British Gold Coast Administrator George Maclean (Hardcover, New)
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This 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.
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