Stepping out of the shadows
DAISY HAY enjoys a biography of two exceptional women, previously confined to the roles of bit-players in the Byron story
In Byron’s Wake: The Turbulent Lives of Lord Byron’s Wife and Daughter by Miranda Seymour Simon & Schuster, 560 pages, £25
In January 1815 the poet Lord Byron travelled to Seaham in County Durham for a wedding. He was the bridegroom; his bride was a brilliant young woman who he nicknamed ‘the princess of parallelograms’. She was known to everyone else as Annabella Milbanke, and she is one of the subjects of this dual biography. The other is the daughter Annabella bore Byron during that short and disastrous marriage. Today, in some circles, that daughter’s name is even better known than her father’s. She was Ada Lovelace, now widely recognised as the world’s first computer programmer.
Annabella and Ada’s stories have been told before. Both have figured as bit-players in the histories of men and both have been subject to virulent posthumous attacks. Miranda Seymour, in contrast, brings these two women back to the centre of their own stories and gives them their due. One welcome result of this approach is that the drama of their relationship with one another takes on new prominence, as Seymour redefines them not in terms of the men in whose shadows they stood, but in relation to each other as mother and daughter.
In this account, Annabella’s chief significance lies, not in the few unhappy months she spent in Byron’s company, but in the way she nourished and supported her brilliant daughter and allowed her intellect to take flight. Seymour does not shy away from the elements of this mother-daughter relationship that were destructive and difficult, and she is clear-sighted about the flaws of both her subjects. Yet this remains a story about two exceptional women who are defined by their achievements and determination rather than by their mistakes.
We follow Annabella out of Byron’s house as she forges a life for herself as a lone woman in 19th-century Britain, and Ada as she meets mathematical polymaths Charles Babbage and Mary Somerville, then breaks new ground in the scientific understanding of the potential of Babbage’s Analytical Engine, and finally becomes enmeshed in a web of gambling and opiate addiction. The psychological drama enacted between Annabella and Ada during the latter’s final year is reconstructed by Seymour with great acuity, as are the battles fought by Ada’s descendants over the reputations of both women.
“Letter-writing,” Seymour writes, “was a medium in which Annabella was never at ease.” Biography tends to be unkind to those who do not express themselves freely with pen and ink, and it takes a careful and sympathetic reader to see past the self-representation of letters and legal documents. Here, in the stories of two women whose reputations rested on fought-over caches of paper, such care and sympathy is crucial. In Seymour’s reading, Annabella and Ada both emerge as complex, rounded individuals, neither as sinned against nor sinning as the biographies of the men with whom they lived would have us believe. This complexity does both them and their biographer credit. Daisy Hayy is a senior lecturer at the University of Exeter and the author of Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (Bloomsbury, 2010)
Today, that daughter’s name is even better known than her father’s