Lady Byron and Her Daughters Read online

  To all those women,

  young or old, rich or poor,

  who know what it takes

  to make a new life for themselves.

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  PART ONE

  1On Her Own

  2Letters in Love

  3The Underside of the Moon

  413 Piccadilly Terrace

  5Dearest Duck

  PART TWO

  6Denial and Isolation—Anger? Bargaining—Depression—Acceptance? Great Scott!

  7Educating Ada

  8Educating England

  9The Half Sisters

  10Intermezzo: Lady Byron Time-Travels on the Brownings’ Moon

  11Attempting Amends at the White Hart

  12Enduring Motherhood

  PART THREE

  13Strange History

  14The Lost Chapter

  15Lady Byron and Her Grandson

  Notes

  Selected Printed Sources

  Illustration Credits

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  FOREWORD

  Anne Isabella Milbanke, always called Annabella, came to London in 1812 at the age of nineteen for the social season. An extremely pretty girl of high intellect, who would one day be an heiress, she had a swarm of suitors attending her. In that same year, twenty-four-year-old Lord Byron woke up to find himself famous, having just published his book-length poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Overnight he became the toast of Regency society, sought after by everyone who was anyone in London. Annabella, a poet in a minor key, wrote “Byronmania,” satirizing the women, including her cousin Caroline Lamb, who “aped” Byron, hoping to attract his attention at the London waltz they all attended. That was where Annabella first saw the handsome, dark, mysterious poet, whose sneering upper lip and lameness did nothing to diminish his celebrity.

  Annabella was from the north country. She was actually more highborn than Byron, as he would later brag, and intellectually she was his equal. This “princess of parallelograms” as Byron called her lovingly during his courtship and snidely in his poetry after she would not return to his control, was a gifted mathematician. She believed that science gave humanity the tools for coming as close to the secrets of creation as possible. She was educated at home at Seaham by tutors from Cambridge, studied Euclid in the original, was a linguist devoted to literature, and was the only child of parents who adored her. From her earliest years, learning from her aristocratic parents’ concern for their tenants and from their liberal politics, she had a desire to do good in the world—to live somehow for the service of others.

  Her idealism was not uncommon among girls of high intelligence who had to be educated at home and knew of life mainly through books. The vicissitudes of life knocked that idealism out of Jane Welsh Carlyle, but not out of Annabella. In fact, the more life hit her in the face, the more she was “saved” as she wrote, through helping others.

  Two years after having refused him, Annabella married Lord Byron. For all her earlier protestations, she was madly in love. She had no idea her aunt, Lady Melbourne, and Byron’s half sister Augusta Leigh had prodded him into this marriage. His incestuous love of half sister Augusta was causing society to whisper, particularly after the birth of their child Medora. Freewheeling Regency high society had only one rule: Do what ever you wish—discreetly. However, incest was considered monstrous. The disclosure that Augusta and Byron had a child together would cast them both beyond the pale, and in the case of married Augusta, she and her children would be ruined.

  From the moment Annabella entered the carriage that was to take the couple off to their honeymoon, the cruelty of Byron’s verbal abuse was such that Annabella thought her new husband must be testing her love or was mentally unhinged. She thought he loved her? he chided. He’d show her. In Part One of this biography he certainly does. After a year, Annabella left their London home with their newly born daughter as Lord Byron had instructed her to do in writing.

  The cycle and spiraling of marital abuse is something we understand two centuries after Byron’s cruelty forced Annabella and her three-week-old daughter from the house of the man she loved. What is less understood today is a second focus of the first part of this biography: The legal difficulties a woman had, even of Annabella’s class, in gaining a Decree of Separation from an abusive husband. Married women had essentially no legal rights—to their own money, to their own bodies, to their children. A child’s “body” belonged to the father.

  Enter Dr. Stephen Lushington, one of the important legal minds of the time, another devout liberal who would become a lifelong friend of Annabella. The image of a cold and unforgiving wife that Byron portrayed in his later poetry and his followers and later critics took to heart stem from the protocol this young woman had to follow in order not to be forced to return to her husband. After telling her to leave, Byron wanted her back under his control. She still loved him, but she refused to be his “victim.” She had too strong a sense of self, and knew, as she put it, he had hurt her too much to forgive her. She feared for her child; she feared for her life.

  Annabella learned a lot about the law in the first months of 1816. Still, with all the expert legal advice she received, it was only the clever way Lushington held his cards aided by a last minute stroke of luck that saved her from Byron’s control.

  LADY BYRON’S life after love has never been fairly explored. In the second part of this biography, such an exploration is attempted. Hardly anyone is aware that after she separated, Lady Byron in her twenties founded the first Infant School in England and in her forties the first Co-Operative School, thus bringing progressive educational ideas from Switzerland and Scotland to her own shores for the benefit of the working poor. She was also an early advocate of the allotment system, and at her schools the children of workers were not only educated, but assigned plots on which to grow healthy produce for home use or for selling back to the school for its use. What’s now being attempted in the White House garden and the roofs of Brooklyn, Lady Byron popularized in England in the early nineteenth century.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote that Lady Byron had with her silent philanthropy done more for England than any other one person of her time. The good she did, however, lies interred under the barrage of Lord Byron’s brilliant poetic spite and later critics’ overwhelming devotion to male genius. Particularly in the late twentieth century, for many, the poet was the only god who hadn’t yet failed. The male poet, that is, though one wished one didn’t have to emphasize the obvious. The feminist defense of Lady Byron is left to Harriet Beecher Stowe in the third part of the biography.

  FOR ALL THE GOOD Lady Byron did for the working poor and for agricultural reform in England, she was not a modern woman finding fulfillment outside her home (or in her case outside of her estates). She was a child of the Regency, and her lasting regret was that she had been torn from her proper role of being Lord Byron’s “Wife.” She knew her husband did not love her once they were married and he ruthlessly pulled the scales from her eyes, but through the marriage and through her life she believed herself to be Lord Byron’s “best friend.” Later in her life, she believed that if one person less had been in the world—his sister Augusta Leigh whom she both loved and hated—the marriage would have lasted come what may.

  The French have a saying that a woman is either a lover or a mother. The first years after the separation, Lady Byron’s infant daughter could not compensate Annabella for her loss of love. Annabella at twenty-four was an imperfect single mother and she knew it. Lord Byron, on the other hand, was a perfect father. As soon as he boarded the ship to leave England in the spring of 1816, he began to write of his enduring love for the infant he
abandoned and once called his “instrument of torture.”

  Educating Ada and leading her gifted and rebellious daughter toward a happy marriage gradually became the central focus of Lady Byron’s life. Ada had inherited her mother’s mathematical acumen as well as her absent father’s imagination and instability. As Ada, Countess of Lovelace, she would write the first computer program in the 1840s, more than a century before the computer as we know it existed. It is only now, in the twenty-first century, that Ada is receiving wide recognition for her accomplishments. Her mathematical genius has recently spread a wide net, and Ada Lovelace Day has become a day of recognition for all women of science and intellectual accomplishment. It is a joyful day, though hers was a short and complex life.

  So many myths, so much “steam punk” literature, has risen around Ada. No longer is she defined by one line of her absent father’s poetry: “ADA! Sole daughter of my house and heart.” Still, no recognition is given to the fact that she was raised by a complex and brilliant single mother whose mathematical prowess was similar to her own. It was as if Ada had sprung full blown from the brow of Zeus—something Ada, being Ada, might not have minded. However, she needed her mother in so many ways, and the relationship between mother and daughter twists and turns through the years, ending in bittersweet recognition and moving reconciliation, as we shall see.

  However, common misconceptions remain. One of them is that Lady Byron kept her child from knowledge of her father and his poetry, and another is that Ada led an exemplary, if tragically short life, devoted to scientific and mathematical study. In truth, Ada, encouraged by con men, would turn her prodigious talents toward gambling and programming the outcomes of horse races—to predictable results.

  A daughter who most certainly did not lead an exemplary life was Medora Leigh, the child of Lord Byron and his half sister Augusta Leigh. Medora was less than a year old when Lady Byron married Lord Byron, and at first Lady Byron believed her husband was attempting to upset her as usual when he said Medora was his child by his sister. This did not stop Lady Byron from loving the beautiful, intelligent infant, and years later it would be Lady Byron, not mother Augusta Leigh, who saved Medora from certain death and then lived with her for a season in Paris before returning to England with her. The love Lady Byron felt for her husband’s child brought back emotions long suppressed, and she was the first to admit Medora’s resemblance to Lord Byron was part of the reason she considered Medora her adopted child. At the same time, the dramatic love-hate relationship between Lady Byron and sister-in-law Augusta flared yet again. It runs like a live wire through these pages.

  Ada had always regretted not having a sibling, and when Lady Byron informed her adult daughter that she had a half sister, Ada was delighted. She met Medora in Paris the Easter of 1841 and was close to her for most of the time that Medora spent under Lady Byron’s protection in England.

  Lady Byron’s relationship with her two daughters plays a large role in her life and in this biography, as does her relationship with her grandchildren. Ada had little time or patience for her three children in the years in which she studied mathematics. “I wished for heirs, never wanted a child,” she complained memorably to her mother. It was Lady Byron who suggested her first grandson should be named Byron. She raised her second grandson, Ralph, and all but raised her granddaughter, the later explorer of the Middle East and saver of the Arabian steed, Lady Anne Blunt. Ada’s growing recognition of her motherhood will correspond with Lady Byron’s during the wrenching months of Ada’s tragic illness.

  Others played central—and dramatic—parts in Lady Byron’s life: her once-adored son-in-law the Earl of Lovelace; the first art historian and esteemed travel writer, Anna Jameson; playwright Joanna Baillie; Sir Walter Scott; the eccentric and creative thinker Charles Babbage, whose ideas for an Analytical Engine predated the computer; Lady Byron’s first cousin Lord Melbourne, whose wife Caroline Lamb once had a mad affair with bad Byron; the young Queen Victoria who relied on Lord Melbourne as her Prime Minister; the charismatic young minister and champion of the working man, Robertson of Brighton, who became Annabella’s second Byron; the freed slaves Ellen and William Craft; and Harriet Beecher Stowe—to skim some of the cream from the cream. Lady Byron’s intelligence, her calm articulation, her liberal views, encompassing knowledge of her times and her incredible psychological understanding of others—not of herself—were evident to all who came to know her.

  I have attempted a biography of a misunderstood yet difficult woman of genius whose main failing was her inability to delve into the darkness in her own nature, though she could understand and condone the darkness in others. She wasn’t the angel her large circle of devoted friends considered her. Nor was she the demented and dull-witted demon that her twentieth-century critics and biographers painted. She was a flawed human being, albeit an exceptional one. The third act of my biography portrays her in her later years, when the grandchildren she loved surrounded her and Harriet Beecher Stowe entered her life—to explosive results.

  In her last decade, Lady Byron brought together all her papers in order to attempt a memoir of her marriage. She hoped to offer a fair and balanced account that could be read by her adult grandchildren after she was gone. Robertson of Brighton, her dearest friend in those years, urged her not to “repress” her emotions. He helped her to order her papers and he recorded their “Conversations.” It was he who would witness her dramatic and final meeting with sister-in-law Augusta Leigh when both of them were old and Augusta next to death. Robertson, more than a score of years Lady Byron’s junior, would have been her perfect collaborator, but once more fate intervened—and all her papers were returned to her.

  After her death, grandson Ralph, whom she raised, would spend decades attempting to redeem Lady Byron’s archives from the resisting hands of ancient executors. Ralph’s friend, author Henry James, witnessed Ralph’s struggles and reshaped them into his masterpiece of a novella, The Aspen Papers (1888). When Ralph gained control of all Lady Byron’s papers in the 1890s, he grappled with whether or not to suppress the evidence that his grandfather Lord Byron had an incestuous relationship with his sister. It took him until 1905 to decide not to censure, but to print truthfully what he hoped would be a privately circulated biography of his grandparents’ ill-fated marriage, Astarte.

  Among the papers Ralph preserved were the many “Statements” Lady Byron wrote but never succeeded in turning into a memoir. In the one Ralph found most poignant, Lady Byron wrote that she had long realized that at least some of the animus directed toward her came from the fact she never defended herself in public against Lord Byron’s brilliant and bitter accounts of her in his later poetry, nor from the critics who continued to degrade her in print. Still: “I have no cause to complain of the world’s unkindness; on the contrary, I am grateful to it.

  In personal intercourse I have only to acknowledge the kindest and most generous treatment, and if I have sometimes been condemned by strangers without evidence, I have certainly been acquitted equally without proof by those on whom I had no claim, of the charges of listening to informers against Lord Byron, sanctioning treacherous practices, etc. There can be no media via to such accusations. The woman who could be guilty of any one of them could not be trust-worthy witness in matters relating to the husband she had injured and betrayed. Read then no further, you who hold this sheet in your hands, unless you can relinquish all prepossessions of that kind. Think of me, as Memory, not as a Person, for I desired not sympathy but an impartial hearing.

  When I look at the accumulation of difficulties in my way, I feel that the truths I may bring forward will but partially dispel illusions, so long accepted as realities, and that even if not as fruitless, it is yet an ungrateful task to translate fascinating verse into bare fact. Apart, however, from any view to benefit the unknown Reader, who may have little disposition to attend to me, I naturally desire to leave a few counter statements for the information of my grandchildren, for I own that on that po
int the opinion formed of me does touch me.

  Think of me as a memory not a person . . . it is an ungrateful task to translate fascinating verse into bare fact. . . . Usually it is in her poetry—and she wrote poetry all her life—that she touches on her emotions, at times brings personal darkness to light. In this “Statement,” she came close to the heart of the matter.

  Of the loves Lady Byron found and lost in her later life, all had some relationship to Lord Byron, as we shall see. She was, as the song says, a one-man woman whose man got away. A brilliant woman who did much for those she loved and for England itself, she had happiness as well as tragedy in her later life, though not unlike that other genius, her husband, she often got in her own way.

  After the death of her own mother and the early death of Lord Byron, Lady Byron had something that very few women, if any, had in her day: Enormous wealth under her own control. It gave her, in her own words, more ways of doing good for others. That’s what she did through her liberality and her liberal views all her life—she helped others. She remained conscious of the fact that she received more than she gave, and that, as she wrote, the poor saved her from herself. I have tried not to save Lady Byron from herself. I think of this biography published two hundred years after that fateful marriage and two hundred years after the birth of Ada, Countess of Lovelace, as the celebration of a worthy but complex woman who led a big life that is still unsung. My hope is that her story will resonate today.

  November 19, 2014

  New York City

  O World I have known Thee! And ere my farewell

  Of thy scorn and thy kindness I frankly would tell.

  Thou cans’t not forget me: embalmed by a Name

  I must live in the record of honour or blame.

  Lady Byron, On My Sixtieth Year