Review: Madeleine Schwartz on Letitia Elizabeth Landon

“Do you know the story of L.E.L.?—the poetess who committed suicide, as some say; but others feel sure was murdered?” Virginia Woolf wrote to Lytton Strachey in 1927. Few readers now will recognize the name, but, as Lucasta Miller shows in her tantalizing recent biography, Letitia Elizabeth Landon was as recognized in her time as Shelley and Byron—a poe…