On 18 September 1814, Lord Byron was dining at his house, Newstead Abbey, with his apothecary and Augusta Leigh, the half-sister with whom he had recently had a baby daughter, when a gardener brought in his late mother’s wedding ring, disinterred from a nearby flowerbed. The man’s timing was eerie. Also delivered to the breakfast table that fateful morning was a letter from a clever and impetuous heiress called Annabella Milbanke in which she accepted his (somewhat grudging) proposal of marriage. Seeing both, the superstitious Byron turned a little white – though his shivery mood seems to have had no effect on his acerbity. “It never rains but it pours,” he is reported to have said, on reading Milbanke’s note.
Thus was a doomed marriage sealed – though no matter how many accounts one reads of the Byrons’ strange courtship, let alone of the tempestuous months that followed their wedding in January of the following year, it will always remain a touch unreal, being so unfathomable. There are difficult men, and then there is Lord Byron. Granted, Milbanke did not yet know what was going on elsewhere in the poet’s private life; his terrorising mood swings may have seemed as thrilling as his verse from the distance of Seaham Hall, her home in County Durham.
Nevertheless, it is strikingly odd that when Byron, pasty from another of his mad diets, arrived at Seaham a couple of weeks later, it was 15 months since they had last clapped eyes on one another: theirs was a relationship, desultory and fractious, hitherto conducted almost entirely on paper.
Why did they do it? Marriage, I mean. On Byron’s side, there was both the question of money (he was broke) and the need to find some means of quietening the frantic gossip that now trailed him; the fact that his patience for Milbanke was extremely limited was always going to take second place to these considerations. But on her side, questions abound. Did she not grasp that it would have been easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than reform a rake like Byron? Or perhaps that was it. The good little Unitarian would calm and trammel him, domesticate the beast.
If the aim of Miranda Seymour’s new book is to put Byron’s wife, Annabella Milbanke, and their increasingly famous daughter, Ada Lovelace, centre stage, then it comes with an in-built problem, which is that, ever brilliant and insatiable, he simply will not leave the page. Not only were his wife and child still dealing with the rumours of cruelty, incest and sodomy – a then illegal activity, which, Seymour speculates, his young wife may have enjoyed – long after his death in 1824; they remained, in emotionally complex ways, in his thrall all their lives. Milbanke did her best to present herself as the wronged party once he’d fled the country in 1816 fearing arrest, but she never took another lover; in adulthood, Lovelace always thrilled to her father’s legend.
Aware of this fault line, Seymour’s response has been to throw herself into her research; there is never likely to be a more exhaustive account of the life of Milbanke. But this comes at a price for the reader. Was it in trying to cast off Byron’s exotic shadow that Seymour, a wonderful writer whose control is usually just so, allowed herself to get so bogged down in unnecessary detail?
A further problem lies with Milbanke, later a noted educational reformer. Her early devotion to her sister-in-law rival Augusta Leigh, by being so unlikely, is fascinating. So, too, is her later disgust for her, once she has somehow convinced herself that it was Leigh who destroyed her relationship with Byron. In 1850, Milbanke agreed to meet Leigh, now destitute and desperate for financial help, at a coaching inn between Brighton and London. The encounter did not go well. “I was afraid of myself,” she said later. “The strongest desire to be out of her presence took possession of me, lest I should be tempted beyond my strength.” Perhaps she had repressed her emotions in this matter for too long, for it was at about this time, also, that she began worrying over whether Ada’s sons, her grandsons, were ever left alone with their sister. The children should at all times be watched, she told her daughter, as if incest was in the marrow.
But Milbanke is a bloodless creature beside Ada Lovelace, who inherited from her father a certain unfettered quality – the ability to live life to the full irrespective of the consequences for others. In the 21st century, her visionary association with the mathematician Charles Babbage and his steam-powered calculating machine are well known (a pioneer of computing, Lovelace wrote what is generally considered to be the first algorithm; to a generation of feminist coders, she is a heroine).
However, it would be a mistake to take her for some proto-bluestocking, earnestly going about her work. Her passionate interest in the experiments of such scientists as Michael Faraday and Andrew Crosse ran alongside other, less useful enthusiasms: for the lover who wanted her only for her money; for horse racing, to which she became so addicted she was forced to pawn the Lovelace jewels, replacing them with paste (Ada’s husband, an aristocrat called William King, was a whimsical type, whose fanaticism for architecture – he was always building something – afforded her much of the freedom she needed).
Finding children boring, she was a neglectful mother; craving the company of like minds, she was apt (endearingly, to my eyes) to boast about “the great laboratory of my brain”. Most inspiriting of all, she rarely let the ill health from which she suffered all her life get her down. “Give me powers with pain a million times over, rather than ease with even talents,” she wrote to her mother in 1843.
Alas, Lovelace’s unquenchable nature has the same deleterious effect as Byron’s on Seymour’s book: you miss it too much once it is gone (she died of cervical cancer in 1852 at 36, the same young age as her father). Milbanke outlived her by eight years. The final section of In Byron’s Wake is devoted, first, to her last, fairly uneventful years and to the fate of Ada’s children, her grandchildren; and then to the determined blackening of Milbanke’s reputation by Byron scholars down the decades. I see why Seymour was tempted to do this, to submit to all her most completist urges. But this stuff should have been an appendix, at most. When the candle of your narrative gutters, best quietly to put it out.
• In Byron’s Wake by Miranda Seymour is published by Simon & Schuster (£25). To order a copy for £17.29 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
