Lucasta Miller

Lucasta Miller is a British critic and biographer who specialises in nineteenth-century literary history. She began on the books pages of the Independent in the 1990s and later wrote long profiles for the Guardian. She judged the Man Booker Prize in 2009. In 2010 she helped launch Notting Hill Editions, a short-book imprint for the nonfiction essay, and served as its editorial director.

Her books keep asking how a writer becomes a legend, and what the legend hides. The Brontë Myth (2001) follows the sisters' reputations through successive eras, starting with the first biography written after their deaths. L.E.L. (2019) recovers Letitia Elizabeth Landon, hailed in her day as the "female Byron", whose death and hidden children were later covered up. Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph builds a short biography around nine poems, set against the Victorian image of the guileless nature poet.

L.E.L. was shortlisted in the biography category of the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Awards in the United States. Her agency also lists it as a Times and Sunday Times Book of the Year. The Brontë Myth was reissued in 2020 with a new introduction.

If you are here from Wuthering Heights, note that her part in the Penguin Classics edition is the preface. The text is edited by Pauline Nestor. Her book on the Brontës is the natural next step, because it deals with the stories readers have attached to Emily, Charlotte and Anne. After that, try L.E.L., which connects Landon to the Brontës' own reading and to the Gothic extremes of Jane Eyre.