Everything I do, I do for my wife Samantha. I draw very little meaningful interest and hardly any inspiration from anyone or anything else. To call her my muse would be a disservice to the passions which enthrall me to her—I am her willing supplicant, ruthless protector, and obsessive lover. I would do anything for her, because she has given me everything.
Women create life and men are forever striving after them, working tirelessly to produce whatever lesser miracles we can in order to make that life more beautiful. For Samantha, that means books. I would never have kept up the practice of writing without her, because I write to make books for her and our daughters, and to see her smile when she reads them—smile and then punch me in the arm before reading on, usually. More recently, however, I was able to give her something even more special—I resurrected her favorite dead poet.
It is no small thing to truly love a dead writer. I suspect we all have at least one, if not several—a voice from beyond the grave that nonetheless speaks through time into the daily meat grinder, shining a sliver of light into our grim, thoroughly modern lives. Say what you will about those of us enraptured by the Gothic, the macabre, the dark transcendent—we love our dead writers dearly.
She loves Letitia Landon, the brilliant but criminally under appreciated English poet of the Romantic period. Known by some as the ‘female Byron,’ Letitia Elizabeth Landon (or LEL as she is more commonly known) produced some of the finest, most innovative narrative poetry ever composed in the English language. She was an early pioneer of reclaiming the central role of women in myth, folklore, fairy tales, love poetry, and more, and did so with both sharp psychological insight and deep poetic feeling. In studying her at my wife’s behest, she quickly became my favorite poet as well (though I will always be partial to Byron—suck it, F. Scott).
The more I read of and learned about LEL the more convinced I was to publish a collection of her poems. Samantha had always mourned the fact that there really are no beautiful, commercial trade editions of LEL’s poetry, and, having just started Bell & Brier, I wanted to give her one. The book below is the result of that particular act of love and literary necromancy.
But resurrection is worthless if the dead are merely put on display. They must be allowed to speak again. So discover LEL for yourself—her passions, her longings, her dark loves and divine spark—and see whether, nearly two centuries later, she still speaks to you from beyond the grave.
—Cody
