Mad, bad and an utter BRUTE of a husband

A womaniser who referred to his sexual encounters as ‘hot luncheons’, Byron married for money. His adultery, incest and drunken rages made him . . .

BOOK OF THE WEEK IN BYRON’S WAKE by Miranda Seymour (Simon & Schuster £25) YSENDA MAXTONE GRAHAM

WHeRe else would the pretty 20-yearold Annabella Milbanke meet her future husband, the poet Lord Byron, than at Lady Caroline Lamb’s morning waltzing party?

That was the kind of entertainment laid on for this provincial heiress, one of the most courted girls in London, during her third London Season in 1812.

In her first two Seasons, Annabella had rejected several nice, eligible suitors. As Miranda Seymour writes in this gripping saga of a double-biography, ‘her heart was obstinately set upon the reformation of a rake’. (As I read that, I heard my mother’s warning: ‘Darling, never marry someone in the hope that you can change them for the better.’)

Annabella fell head over heels in love with mad, bad and dangerous Lord Byron. He intrigued her with his air of ‘quiet contempt’. The whole of upper-class London, it seemed, was infatuated with this fine-boned, pallid, promiscuous and sexually deviant poet with a limp. elizabeth, Duchess of Devonshire, remarked: ‘He is really the only topic of almost every conversation — the men jealous of him, the women of each other.’

Double-biography? well, yes: this book does tell the life stories of two women: Annabella, and her only child by Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace, who grew up to be a mathematical brainbox with the imagination to foresee the birth of the computer.

But see how I’m already mainly talking about another person in this review? The shadow of Byron is everpresent: his powerful, warped character pervaded everything in these women’s lives, even from well beyond his early grave.

His marriage to Annabella lasted only a year and it was a miserable fiasco from day one.

Byron, a serial womaniser who referred to sexual encounters as ‘hot luncheons’, married Annabella only so he could (a) get his hands on the fortune she was due to inherit, and (b) use the respectable marriage to camouflage his ongoing incestuous relationship with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh (with whom he had secretly fathered a daughter, Medora).

Naive Annabella had no idea and just thought of Augusta as a kind sister-in-law. Byron’s regime of coercive control makes Rob in The Archers look positively sweet by comparison. ‘A woman has no right to complain,’ he told Annabella, ‘if her husband does not beat or confine her. I have neither beaten nor confined you.’

‘Yes, but ...’ I wanted to scream at him, as I read of his drunken rages and the way he used to send his wife upstairs to bed early so that he could canoodle downstairs with Augusta (who came to live with them in their rented mansion in Piccadilly).

while Annabella was heavily pregnant, Byron sent up a message to her in the bedroom, telling her to stop pacing the creaky floorboards because the noise was getting on his and Augusta’s nerves.

TeRRIfIeD that her husband was actually going to murder her, Annabella ran away to her parents, taking one-year-old Ada with her. Neither of them ever set eyes on Byron again.

A mysterious allegation surfaced that Byron had once, in a paroxysm of madness, actually committed murder.

This charge frightened him out of his wits. That, combined with his fear of being convicted for sodomy and incest, forced him to sail away to exile in Italy. He died of a fever eight years (and about five thousand ‘hot luncheons’) later, aged 36.

At this juncture, Seymour’s book shifts gear and becomes a story of two remarkably forward-looking women who needed to be strong to fight off the taint of association with a man whose rumoured incest was an undying source of gossip. Nowadays, reputations