The improvisatrice

the long version

L.E.L. - poet, novelist, playwright, reviewer - wrote busily and profitably, one of a generation of women writers active as the last phase of Romanticism ushered in the Victorian period. She wrote with enviable ease and professional polish, as the ballads and narrative poems in this volume amply demonstrate. In her thirties she made an unfortunate marriage, went to Africa with her husband, and mysteriously died there in the same year, whether by accident or suicide is not known. The improvisatrice was published in 1824 and went rapidly through several editions. This facsimile is based on the fifth of 1825.