The Fate Of Adelaide A Swiss Romantic Tale And Other Poems

The work of ‘L.E.L.’ began to be published when she was only seventeen, and in her early twenties Landon had already achieved considerable renown. As a widely envied independent woman in London society, however, she was increasingly the subject of scandalous gossip. Eventually she married the governor of a colony in West Africa, and died under mysterious circumstances soon after arriving in Africa, aged thirty-six. Landon’s life contributed very largely to the nineteenth-century archetype of the poet as a breed apart, heroic but doomed. Her poetry, however, was until very recently largely forgotten; this is the first twentieth-century edition of her poems, which the editors describe as “cold and sentimental at the same time, flat and intense.” In addition to a broad selection of Landon’s poetry and prose, this volume also includes a wide variety of contextual materials and a comprehensive bibliography.

This groundbreaking volume not only documents the richness of their literary contributions but changes our thinking about the poetry of the English Romantic period.

The Petrarchan revival in Romantic England was a unique phenomenon which involved an impressive number of scholars, translators and poets. This book analyses the way Petrarch was read and re-written by Romantic figures. The result is a history of the Romantic-era sonnet and a new lens for understanding English Romantic poetry.

Covering a wide range of authors, among them Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning, Clare, Mary Shelley and Disraeli, Cronin brings light and order to one of the murkiest quarters in recent British literary history. Brimming with intelligent and original perceptions about authors of works that have fallen through literary-historical cracks, Romantic Victorians offers shrewd assessments of their formal and tactical designs.