L.E.L., the initials under which Letitia Elizabeth Landon published her works, inhabits a hybrid space in the domain of female nineteenth-century poetry. As Stephenson points out, the identification of the astute businesswoman, the romantic poetess and the persona constructed through the different reactions of the readership is problematical (4). Throughout her life, L.E.L. showed a keen sense of the literary market and a sharp ability to overcome the restraints the literary conventions imposed upon the female poet, as the pressing financial difficulties turned her into the main source of income for the whole family. In the nineteenth century, the question of authorship was a highly charged site in the case of a female poet. The "poetess" was ascribed by male critics a set of specific characteristics whose subtext was the construction of the ideal woman, and her signature shifted the notion of authorship into a strictly defined and marginalized space. Landon’s provocative and deconstructive position towards an ideology that defined the female as innately emotional, intuitive, sentimental and illogical did not follow the example of Mary Wollstonecraft’s open attacks against the ideological establishment. Rather, she located herself in the traditional paradyme that constructed the female gender as feelings and sensibility, but through the sharp irony and mockery disguised in her lines and through the unconventionality and wit displayed by her social personality, she showed how the nineteenth-century woman’s identity inhabits a more critical position than it could at first appear and that the woman’s subjectivity is, perhaps, a borderline state.

After her family was hit by financial hardships, she submitted her poems to albums and periodicals as a main source of income. During the 1820s, she produced sentimental verses for the Literary Gazette –the periodical started in 1817 by Henry Colburn and the foremost authority on the literary market- and also started to collaborate as an anonymous reviewer.

Her collection The Improvisatrice, And Other Poems (1824) was initially turned down by the publishers and later on accepted in view of the enthusiastic interest that the poems signed L.E.L. had attracted. The collection obtained a great success; "the mysterious L.E.L. had captured the imagination of the general public and the book went through six editions in the first year" (Stephenson 1995: 28). She achieved a considerable reputation and her fame increased to the point that she became a public figure. Despite her financial problems, she maintained a keen interest in fashionable dresses and made any attempt to fit into the circles in which she was now moving. After the death of her father in 1825, the family was left even more impoverished and the financial difficulties became even more pressing. Shortly thereafter she published The Troubadour: Poetical Sketches of Modern Pictures, and Historical Sketches.

As an independent and successful young woman, she attracted the circulation of rumours and romance stories of presumed conquests and in 1826 she was slandered by the The Wasp, a satirical magazine dedicated to expose any sort of scandals involving public figures. Specifically, doubts were raised about the nature of her close working relationships with Jerdan at the Literary Gazette. As a result, her Improvisatrice was re-evaluated as showing an immoral tendency. Despite the rumours, she put her reputation at stake with her decision to move outside her grandmother’s house to live independently. As Angela Leighton points out, it was the increasing need to concentrate on her abundant work and her claim for "a room for one’s own" that prompted her to move out (Leighton 1992: 48).

The demand for her work was increasing steadily despite the scandal being revived again. Other works appeared: The Golden Violet (1826), The Venetian Bracelet, the Lost Pleiad, the History of the Lyre, and Other Poems (1829), and the Athenaeum (1831). In 1832, she assumed the editorship of Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrapbook and continued to produce verse for other annuals. Though suffering for her slandered reputation, her literary career continued to flourish.