ABSTRACT
This chapter examines common representations of romantic love in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century women's periodicals and in the immensely popular poetry of Letitia Landon, famous for her tales of tragic love. It argues that women's periodical literature of the romantic period tended to represent women's desires in terms of an economic model designed to teach lovers and consumers how to conserve, rather than squander, desire. The central love story between Lorenzo and the improvisatrice is actually a minor part of the poem that receives its most sustained attention when the love becomes hopelessly doomed. Landon, whose work first appeared in popular literary periodicals magnified the effect of this kind of desire by writing love poems that became some of the most successful literary commodities of the age. Comparing Landon and periodical literature on love, the chapter shows how unsatisfied love contributes to an economic model that insists on saved, rather than expended, desire.
