Daniel Riess’s article, “Laetitia Landon and the Dawn of English Post-Romanticism@Riess, Daniel. "Laetitia Landon and the Dawn of English Post-Romanticism." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. 36:4 (Autumn 1996). 807-827.,” begins by asking us to “[i]magine a reader in the year 1823 encountering the most recent issue of William Jerdan’s Literary Gazette, an inexpensive guide to recent developments in the arts and sciences” (807). He goes on to describe the economic conditions under which Landon wrote and Jerdan published in the 1820s, using the Medallion Wafer poems as a case study to contextualize Landon’s poetry as “post-Romantic,“ a movement Riess defines as “occur[ing] amid the ever-increasing commodification of literature and the visual arts” (808). He argues that “post-Romantic” poetry “attempts to preserve the Romantic style of writing while simultaneously rejecting the Romantic artist’s claim that art transcends the ills of the social environment” (813). It is a brief definition of a complex transitional period, and one of this exhibit’s projects is to trouble the idea that Landon “reject[s]” the transcendent powers of the aesthetic in her poems for the Gazette. Rather, it seems evident that the division between the commercial and affective functions of poetry is, for Landon, by no means clear or necessary.     

Riess briefly discusses the issue of gender for Landon, citing Virgil Nemoianu’s argument that Landon persistently infused her poetry with allusions to secondary, or already re-interpreted, artistic models, as Keats did when he wrote “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” in order to avoid condemnation as a female poet (814). Moreover, I would suggest, Landon adopted and adapted narratives about women, both historical/mythological and contemporary, in order to enable her own voice as a female artist and to question the boundaries and identities these narratives inflict.

Although this exhibit focuses on the beginnings of Landon’s remarkable career and investigates the means by which the Medallion Wafer poems, specifically, functioned as both commodity and aesthetic objects and mediated between commercial and artistic endeavors, Riess goes on to discuss Landon’s continued re-appropriation of texts and narratives in her later work, as well as the relationship between post-Romantic commodity poetry and the success she enjoyed in the annuals.

Like Riess, Paula Feldman begins “Women Poets and Anonymity in the Romantic Era@Feldman, Paula R. "Women Poets and Anonymity in the Romantic Era." New Literary History. 33:2 (Spring 2002). 279-289.” with an imaginative project: to imagine the early nineteenth century woman poet’s fear of being publicly known, which keeps her “toiling away in obscurity” and publishing under pseudonyms (279). Feldman’s project, however, is to dismantle this image as an inaccurate representation of women’s actual publishing practice. In fact, she argues, laboring-class women often added descriptors to their names to be more specific (“Wife of a Journeyman Ship-carpenter,” for instance), and those women whose names did not appear were usually of the upper classes, whose books were therefore circulated by and among those who knew them, so no such vulgar advertising was necessary, or were publishing for the first time, and subsequent books would make their names public (280). Feldman goes on to suggest that anonymity at the time was not only “a temporary state or a transparent pose” but also not a specifically female practice, and although there were specific cases when anonymity was preferred (which she describes at the end of the article), gender was a key consideration only where the content of the work was controversial (281).

The myth of female anonymity persisted, Feldman argues, because those who rediscovered the Romantic women poets were not often familiar with periodical publishing practices, in which anonymity was the rule rather than the exception. In addition, stories of anonymous and pseudonymous publishing have been persistently more widely circulated and their details more widely applied because of the interest they generate and because of high-profile Victorian cases like the Brontes and George Eliot. Finally, Feldman suggests a twentieth century critical reluctance to admit that the “obscurity of some of the major women poets of the romantic era has been due not to silencing in their own time but largely to their erasure by literary historians, critics, and anthologists from the early part of the twentieth century” (284).

The publication of L. E. L.’s name or initials on her own work is an important element in this exhibit; Feldman demonstrates adeptly that it would be unusual for her signatory initials to be an attempt to conceal her identity; rather, as this exhibit argues, she used them in order to establish a very public identity under which her poetry could be sold to a receptive and loyal audience.

Judith Law Fisher’s “‘In the Present Famine of Anything Substantial’: Fraser's ‘Portraits’ and the Construction of Literary Celebrity; or, ‘Personality, Personality Is the Appetite of the Age’”@Fisher, Judith Law."‘In the Present Famine of Anything Substantial’:Fraser's‘Portraits’ and the Construction of Literary Celebrity; or, ‘Personality, Personality Is the Appetite of the Age’.” Victorian Periodicals Review. 39:2 (Summer 2006). 97-135. is an extensive investigation of the social and political functions of Fraser’s Magazine’s 1830-1838 portraits of public figures. Her discussion of Landon’s portrait, specifically, is situated within her argument about the inclusion of women in general; “the necessity was to disappear female sexuality into contained domestic femininity,” she argues (116). Like early notes accompanying Landon’s poetry in the Gazette, the text in Fraser’s reiterates a specific narrative of youthful femininity (Landon was 31 when the portrait was published): “there is too much about love in [the poems], some cross-grained critic will say. How, Squaretoes, can there be too much of love in a young lady’s writings? We reply in a question. Is she to write of politics, or political economy, or pugilism, or punch? Certainly not” (qtd. in Fisher 119). The portrait itself, Fisher suggests, echoes this sentimental image.

The commenter in Fraser’s goes on to say, tellingly, that Landon “does right in thinking that Sappho knew what she, was about when she chose the tender passion as the theme for woman” (ibid.). This judgment, that women poets must be more suited to telling narratives about love, is one Landon anticipated and wrestled with in the Medallion poems as she adopted and reworked myths about women and their relationship to art and love. Fisher cites Mary Poovey on the Victorian woman writer: “a woman who wrote for publication threatened to collapse the ideal from which her authority was derived and to which her fidelity was necessary for so many other social institutions to work” (qtd. in Fisher 123). Whereas Fraser’s sought to reinscribe the domestic sentimental poet and, Fisher argues, reinforce the authority of its male subjects, Landon herself embraced her professional role and used those inherited narratives as part of a professional project of communicating the difficulties faced by women in the arts and women in their relationships to art.