Letitia Elizabeth Landon, born on 14 August 1802 in Chelsea, London, and dead on 15 October 1838 at Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast, was one of the most celebrated, industrious, and misunderstood writers of the British Romantic period. Known to her immense contemporary readership by the initials “L.E.L.,” she became a literary phenomenon while still very young: a poet whose verses appeared week after week in maga…
“This love of nature is divinely given to keep alive, even in the most toiling and world-worn existence, something of the imaginative and the apart.”
Neighbourhood:
Love Poets, Romantic Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, born Mary Pierrepont in May 1689 and dead on 21 August 1762, was one of the most formidable and variously gifted figures of the eighteenth century: poet, letter writer, satirist, aristocrat, traveller, political observer, mother, friend, adversary, and advocate for a medical practice that helped alter the history of public health. She lived in an age that praised female modesty while avidly…
“I have no notion of loving people by halves; it is not my nature. My attachments are always excessively strong.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, LGBTQ+ Poets, Love Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Spirituality, Tenderness