Poisoned Lives: The Regency Poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon (Lel) and British Gold Coast Administrator George MacLean

ISBN-13: 9781845194208 / Angielski / Twarda / 2010 / 300 str.

Watt, Julie

Opis

This work is a double biography of Letitia Elizabeth Landon the best-selling Regency poet known to her contemporaries as the female Byron and her husband George Maclean, a British administrator on the Gold Coast, known as the father of modern Ghana. It tells of how Landon s reading public adored her writing and poetry and made her the best-selling female author of her time. Moreover as an early media celebrity, her life was the subject of society gossip, so her sudden death in Africa shocked the nation and led to rumors of suicide or murder. The biography then shares how the scandal unjustly ruined her husband career despite helping clear 200 miles of Western African coast of British slave trading, making peace with the warlike Asante, instituting a judicial system still in use in many African democracies, and encouraging successful and fair trading. An insightful and stirring work, this book encapsulates the life story of a woman who influenced such authors as Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti and her brother, Dante Gabriel."