A dazzling new look into the short but intense, tragic life and remarkable work of John Keats, one of the greatest lyric poets of the English language, seen in a whole new light, not as the mythologized Victorian guileless nature-lover, but as the subversive, bawdy complex cynic whose life and poetry were lived and created on the edge.In this brief life, acclaimed biographer Lucasta Miller takes nine of Keats's best-known poems—"Endymion"; "On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer"; "Ode to a Nightingale"; "To Autumn"; "Bright Star" among them—and excavates how they came to be and what in Keats's life led to their creation. She writes of aspects of Keats's life that have been overlooked, and explores his imagination in the context of his world and experience, paying tribute to the unique quality of his mind. Miller, through Keats’s poetry, brilliantly resurrects and brings vividly to life, the man, the poet in all his...

A lost nineteenth century literary life, brilliantly rediscovered—Letitia Elizabeth Landon, hailed as the female Byron; she changed English poetry; her novels, short stories, and criticism, like Byron though in a woman's voice, explored the dark side of sexuality—by the acclaimed author of The Brontë Myth ("wonderfully entertaining . . . spellbinding"—New York Times Book Review; "ingenious"—The New Yorker)."None among us dares to say / What none will choose to hear"—L.E.L., "Lines of Life" Letitita Elizabeth Landon—pen name L.E.L.—dared to say it and made sure she was heard. Hers was a life lived in a blaze of scandal and worship, one of the most famous women of her time, the Romantic Age in London's 1820s, her life and writing on the ascendency as Byron's came to an end. Lucasta Miller tells the full story and re-creates the literary London of her time. She was born in 1802 and was shaped...