Oxford don’s wife branded ‘illiterate and vain’ in poison pen campaign
AS a distinguished Shakespearean scholar, Sir Jonathan Bate is used to studying revenge drama.
But now the Oxford University don is the subject of a real-life villainous plot – at the hands of a poison-pen writer.
Sinister letters have been sent to Sir Jonathan, the head of Worcester College, claiming his wife Paula Byrne is tarnishing the reputation of the esteemed seat of learning.
The couple have received 17 poisonous letters and are convinced the author is a former female colleague of Sir Jonathan’s. The first message described his wife, a bestselling biographer, as ‘barely literate’ and ‘pathologically vain’. It also urged Sir Jonathan, 59, to ‘please, please do something about Paula’.
But far from being cowed by such vitriol, Miss Byrne, 50, has used the ominous three-year campaign as the basis for her debut novel, called Look To Your Wife, which will be published next week.
The mother-of-three said she has taken revenge through fiction because she refuses ‘to collude in a conspiracy of silence’.
Miss Byrne, who is Sir Jonathan’s second wife, told the Mail: ‘I have been stalked for years by somebody who I haven’t been in touch with for a long time.
‘It has been hugely upsetting because the letters are particularly inflammatory and misogynistic. The letters attacked my workingclass roots in Liverpool and accused me of looking like a transvestite. They were really unpleasant and personal attacks.
‘But I have turned around this terrible experience and am trying to make it into something positive.
‘The thing about anonymous letters is that you can’t fight back, so writing the novel is cathartic and a way of saying this is how I feel about the letters and the trolling.’
Some of the more recent mysterious letters are purportedly from different people, including a colleague, a prospective student, a group of undergraduates, a mother whose daughter died of anorexia and a doctor.
All are quietly aggressive and include remarks that Miss Byrne is ‘ill- educated’, ‘ugly’, ‘fat’, ‘a bad mother’, and hated in Oxford where she is known as Sir Jonathan’s ‘Wag’. On one occasion, the writer, who has written books on Jane Austen and Evelyn Waugh, travelled to a literary festival to give a talk and discovered that a picture of her face had been cut out of a promotional poster at the event.
One of the first letters to arrive was a spoof, with some Shakespearean spellings, as if penned by Miss Byrne herself.
The fake Miss Byrne wrote that ‘if Jonathan dumps me, will I still be “Laydy Bayte”?’ before confiding: ‘I get bored of men within two years unless they happen to be a passport to a glam life, which luckily my darling Jonathan is.’
It goes on to criticise ‘dowdy telly dons like Bettany Hughes and Lucy Worsley. Who would want to look like them?’
The writer vows to ignore those ‘who say I look like a cross between a tranny and a Cheshire housewife’ and suggests ‘that one very cruel person told me my book on Waugh seemed ghost-written’. Although the letters contain a litany of personal attacks, Miss Byrne admits that some of them are ‘funny and cleverly constructed’.
‘I’m fascinated about the psychology behind the letters,’ she added. ‘Although they are undermining, they are almost too good to waste.
‘Women are often the target of such abuse – and are often the culprits, as in this case.’
The most recent letter was sent in January and pretended to be from a local GP and attacked Miss Byrne’s previous writings on mental health.
Miss Byrne said she has given a statement to Thames Valley Police and its officers are investigating whether the letters could be a crime under the Protection from Harassment Act and the Malicious Communications Act.