The biographer, Julia Markus,
teaches English at Hofstra, and, based on this book alone, she is very well qualified to teach the
subject! Although she is an advocate for the women in her book—justifiably so,
in my view (see above)—she writes neither with bitterness nor disdain but with
a patent admiration for Annabella and for her daughters, especially Ada (about
whom, more later). She also writes with grace and with an eloquent ease that
will invite rather than repel readers. Yes, her book rests on a foundation of
scholarship—sturdy scholarship—but it
is an attractive, artful edifice that rises above and even, at times, makes you
forget what lies below.
She begins in London, 1812,
where the nineteen-year-old Anne Isabella Milbanke (she used the name
Annabella) has gone to stay for the nonce. (At this time, Byron was 24.) She
was born, well off, in 1792 (making her five years older than Mary Shelley),
was a “prodigy in math and languages,”[1] and so beautiful that she
had a stable-full of suitors, all of whom she pretty much sent packing.
One of her cousins was Lady
Caroline Lamb (1784–1828), who had her own torrid affair with Byron, an affair
whose volcanic heat (and later arctic coolness) she recorded in her novel about
their relationship, Glenarvon (1816)—the
very year of the “Frankenstein
summer.”[2] It’s a tale chockablock
with such sentences as this one: …
suddenly she started as if shuddering on the very edge of perdition, in the
dark labyrinth of sin—on the fathomless chasm which opened before her feet.[3]
I’d have to say that Glenarvon could
stand on the shelf with Fifty Shades of
Gray and their ilk—differing only in that Caroline Lamb’s century (and class)
prohibited the sort of gleeful naughty detail available to E. L. James, et al.
I began reading Glenarvon in April 1999, when I was on
my “Mary Adventure” in Europe. My train reading. And hotel reading. Here’s
something I wrote on April 17:
I just hit p. 100 in Glenarvon, a novel I’m enjoying more and more as I
proceed. No wonder LB was attracted
to Caroline Lamb: She was intelligent, witty, talented, fearless—all qualities
doomed, finally, to repel a man in the 19th century (and the 20th
& 21st, one suspects). I
laughed aloud a few times at the witty prattle of these people w/ too much
money and far too much leisure—no wonder there are revolutions in the world! Glenarvon
(LB) himself has yet to make his appearance, and I’m getting eager to meet him
through CL’s eyes.
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