The work of ‘L.E.L.’ began to be published when she was only seventeen, and in her early twenties Landon had already achieved considerable renown. As a widely envied independent woman in London society, however, she was increasingly the subject of scandalous gossip. Eventually she married the governor of a colony in West Africa, and died under mysterious circumstances soon after arriving in Africa, aged thirty-six. Landon’s life contributed very largely to the nineteenth-century archetype of the poet as a breed apart, heroic but doomed. Her poetry, however, was until very recently largely forgotten; this is the first twentieth-century edition of her poems, which the editors describe as “cold and sentimental at the same time, flat and intense.” In addition to a broad selection of Landon’s poetry and prose, this volume also includes a wide variety of contextual materials and a comprehensive bibliography.

This book studies the print culture of the nineteenth century as it shaped the meanings and the cultural significance of literary works by women writers - Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lady Blessington, Lady Morgan, Caroline Norton, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and others. Colour'd Shadows explains and interprets the physical forms of their books, the economics and politics of production and reception, and the cultural meanings of their literary work, showing how poems, literary annuals, engravings, commercial arrangements, the practices of women editors as well as writers, the politics of gender, the changing means of production, and women's literary relationships unfold in the medium of print and, more largely, the rapidly changing culture of the century.

The novels in this collection present a vivid picture of late-Regency society clinging to modes of behaviour which soon became obsolete and mark an important point of transition to Victorian cultural values.