On 7 June 1838 Letitia Elizabeth Landon married George Maclean; on 5 July they sailed for Cape Coast; on 16 August they landed and one month later, Landon, at the age of thirty six, was found dead, slumped against her bedroom door with an empty bottle of prussic acid in her hand.

This is the first full account of the literary career, life and death of the woman who achieved fame as the poetess L.E.L. Glennis Stephenson begins with an account of the rise of the poetess in the early nineteenth century, and then, drawing upon contemporary memoirs and reviews and upon many of Landon's own unpublished letters, moves on to her early life, and shows how Landon fit herself into this category of 'poetess' by constructing the persona of L.E.L.

The book concludes with a discussion of Landon's sudden and mysterious death, and how various readings and misreadings offered by friends and acquaintances struggled to reconcile the dual persona of Woman and poetess. The life and works of this fascinating figure illuminate the conflicts, both personal and artistic, for women writers in the nineteenth century.