History has not been kind to Caroline Lamb. The writer and lover of Lord Byron, who characterised him as ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’, has generally been dismissed by his biographers, and those of her husband, William Lamb, the future Lord Melbourne, as an ‘unhinged’ exhibitionist with scant literary talent.
Fed up with the social humiliation, Lamb’s family urged William to separate from his now notorious wife, a demand that intensified after the publication of Glenarvon, Caroline’s first novel which caused a sensation for its fictionalised version of her once close relationship with Byron.
More books followed but by the time she died in 1828 at the age of 42, Caroline was an outcast from London society and regarded by many as mad.
Was she a manic depressive or had Byron — a paradoxical character who made a habit of emotionally torturing his lovers — driven her over the edge?
Readers of Antonia Fraser’s latest, and likely last, biography will find no easy answers. In this nuanced, finely-wrought portrait of the only daughter of the third earl of Bessborough; Caro, as she was called by those who knew her best, emerges as a creative, playful, affectionate and intellectually curious woman whose talents would have shone in a more generous age.
Fraser does not glorify her subject: Caroline, she stresses, ‘permitted’ her ‘passion’ for Byron ‘to rule her life’. But rather than classify her erratic behaviour in the aftermath of the affair as the response of a manic depressive, as others have done, Fraser suggests Caroline’s despair arose from a fear of ‘the absence of love’.
She was a woman who craved attention. Her mother whom she ‘adored’ was distracted by a string of lovers, principally Lord Granville Leveson-Gower, the pair met when he was just 21. Years later, a famous commentator derided Harriet Bessborough, sister of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, as the ‘hack whore of the last half century’.
In Fraser’s words, the effects of this environment on a ‘sensitive child like Caroline ‘can only be surmised’.
She urges caution at every turn. The laudanum occasionally used to ‘calm’ the young Caro was ‘not an exceptional remedy’; back then it was a drug bandied around like paracetamol.
While others have painted Caroline in lurid colours, Fraser steers clear of melodrama. Caro was Byron’s most famous lover, but she was also the doting mother of Augustus Lamb, a large, boisterous boy who was probably autistic.
Not that Fraser goes in for medical diagnoses. She acknowledges Caroline’s ‘fragile sanity’ but argues she was not ‘crazy’, and says there is no conclusive evidence of manic depression, part of the trouble being the racing thoughts and manic energy were not matched by ‘periods of depression’.
Nor should Caroline’s literary output be overlooked: Fraser judges Glenarvon “an astonishing achievement for a first novel by a young woman…without the learning given to her male contemporaries’.
Caroline made many mistakes; chief among them her foolish stalking of Byron. But in Fraser’s artful rendering, she can also be seen as the ‘unusual, intelligent and independent woman’ that she was; one who thumbed her nose at convention and who exhibited true courage in the face of death.
Gretchen Friemann is a journalist and writer and the author of The Treaty: The Gripping Story of the Negotiations that brought about Irish Independence and led to the Civil War.
