A famous poet, a mysterious death, and a story stranger than fiction. This is the lost life and mysterious death of the "Female Byron." On October 15, 1838, the body of a thirty-six-year-old woman was found at Cape Coast Castle in West Africa, holding a bottle of cyanide in her hand. She was one of the most famous English poets of her time: Letitia Elizabeth Landon, known by her initials "L.E.L." What was she doing in Africa? Was her death an accident? Did she commit suicide or was she perhaps murdered? To her contemporaries, she was an iconic figure, praised as the "Female Byron." However, she was also a woman with secrets, the mother of three illegitimate children, whose existence was erased from the record. After her death, she became the subject of a cover-up that this book uncovers, unearthing an entire lost literary culture.