Author: Landon, Letitia Elizabeth (1802-38)
Title:The Golden Violet, with its Tales of Romance and Chivalry; with Other Poems
Date: 1827
Contemporary Reviews of this Volume
Early reviewers presumed L.E.L.'s immersion in true personal feeling and faulted her art, as, for example, the anonymous review of The Troubadour and The Golden Violet, probably written by John Arthur Roebuck and published in The Westminster Review, 7 (January 1827): 50-67:
L.E.L.'s poems are, for the most part, metrical romances; generally sentimental descriptions of sentimental loves: it is nothing wonderful, therefore, that they have attracted the admiration of her female readers. Love is the great business of a woman's life; and anyone who discourses with but ordinary ability on this all-important topic, finds in a woman a ready, patient, and admiring listener. . . . L.E.L. has acquired a degree of fame by writing on love, which she by no means deserves. (rpt. in McGann and Riess, 304-305)
Sheppard, Sarah. Characteristics of the Genius and Writings of L.E.L.. London: Longman, Brown, and Longman, Paternoster Row, 1841.
After all, we cannot agree with the assertion that there is nothing but 'love' in Miss Landon's poetry. How varied are the subjects which her versatile genius has delineated! Has it not fathomed the depths of the poet's soul, and laid bare to our gaze its glorious intellectual operations and their results,--its creations and aspirings,--its hopes and fears,--not only with poetic feeling, but with philosophic accuracy? Has not that genius led us into the interior of conventional life, and showed to us the vanity, the heartlessness, the petty strifes, the mean jealousies of the circles whose idols are outward appearances? Has it not borne us on its rainbow-coloured wings from scene to scene, from subject to subject, of nature and art, giving to each a grace and interest it knew not before; and, from apparently the most intractable sources, winning rich gems of historical association and permanent truth, being always and every where constant to the grand philosophical principle of generalization, and to the writer's favorite topic of human character? It needs only a reference to her works to prove that there is scarcely one production of her genius that might not be cited as an illustration of her extensive knowledge and diversified talents. (26-27)
Prepared by Haley Eustice, University of Nebraska, Spring 2018
© Haley Eustice, 2018