ABSTRACT
This chapter explores what happens when the melancholy poetic heroine popularised in the Elegiac Sonnets becomes a commodity to be bought and sold in the ever-expanding literary marketplace of the early nineteenth century. It argues that the female poet faced a number of new pressures in this era, when public celebrity became an inevitable side effect of literary success. One of the many contradictions inherent in Landon's approach to poetic production can be seen in her engagement with the discourse of sensibility. The chapter argues that Landon's mythologisation as the archetypal suffering female poet reflects, and perhaps exemplifies, the pressures being brought to bear on women in the increasingly conservative literary climate of the early nineteenth century. It presents comparison of Landon and Byron because, the popular response to the early deaths of the famous poets of the late-Romantic period throws into relief the very different implications of male and female celebrity.
