The Life, and Embittered Loves, of a Romantic Poet

THE KINDNESS OF SISTERS

Annabella Milbanke and

the Destruction of the Byrons

By David Crane

Alfred A. Knopf

320 pp., $26.95

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“The news of his death came down on my heart like a mass of lead

Thus wrote the future Victorian sage Thomas Carlyle to Jane Welsh, his future wife, on learning of the death of Lord Byron in 1824, his 36th year, from a fever contracted while fighting in the cause of Greek independence. Carlyle’s reaction was typical of the outpouring of shock and grief that greeted the poet’s death. Although Byron is still famous today, it is hard to conceive just how large he once loomed.

Much of Byron’s poetry (apart from his scintillating comic satire “Don Juan” and the occasional well-wrought lyric) may strike us as bombastic and hollow. Yet Byron, perhaps the least imaginative of the great English Romantics, was indubitably the most celebrated in his day, bigger than Elvis and Princess Diana rolled into one.

David Crane’s “The Kindness of Sisters” helps illuminate the nature of Byron-mania. Crane focuses on the tortuous relationship between two women caught up in his spell: his wife, Annabella Milbanke, and his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. Byron was embroiled in a scandalous affair with Lady Caroline Lamb and was trying to put an end to her pursuit of him. More significantly, he had also become sexually involved with Augusta, so marriage to the youthful, clever Miss Milbanke, an accomplished mathematician, seemed to offer a way out.

But a way out of what? It is Crane’s contention that Byron (consciously or not) was seeking an excuse to escape the “right little, tight little island” of England, and that a disastrous marriage was his way of forcing himself to take the plunge. This seems a trifle far-fetched. Wouldn’t it have been simpler to leave England without going through all this Sturm und Drang? Then again, things were never simple with Byron.

Immediately after the wedding, Byron’s first words to his new bride were: “It must come to a separation. It is enough that you are my wife for me to hate you.” Although there were moments of joy still in store for his baffled but besotted wife, there were many more of cruelty and misery. Stranger yet was the business of Augusta, who at one point came to live with them. The sisters-in-law became close friends, joining forces to try and manage their difficult man. But Byron did not disguise the fact that it was Augusta whom he truly loved.

Within a year, Annabella had taken their infant daughter, Ada, and fled to her parents. Byron fled the country, adjuring Annabella to “be kind” to his beloved sister.

Annabella soon became involved in a war of words attempting to establish her status as the high-minded, injured party, and damning her former spouse and his compliant sister as the sinners. Byron was beyond her reach, but Augusta, emotionally and financially dependent on her sister-in-law, became the object of Annabella’s evangelical campaign for moral reform, which lasted into the next generation with a battle for the souls of their daughters: Annabella and Byron’s Ada (a gifted mathematician like her mother, but with worrying signs of dissolution like her father), and Augusta’s troubled and erratic daughter Medora, believed to be Byron’s as well.

The centerpiece of Crane’s book is a brilliantly conceived dramatic scene in the form of a play: a fact-based, if necessarily speculative, reconstruction of the last face-to-face meeting between Annabella and Augusta, which took place in 1851. In Annabella, Crane sees a microcosm of the deep ambivalence of British society: sedate, orderly and moralistic on one hand, yet secretly in love with rebellion, wildness and passion on the other. Crane’s understanding of Annabella’s continuing susceptibility to Byronic charm makes her seem a sympathetic character: She genuinely wants to redeem all that Byronic “beauty and grace” from sin.

But in the final analysis, he portrays Annabella as the heavy, even though the story also invites a different interpretation, in which the real heavy is Byron himself.

Unlike his friend and fellow pariah Shelley, Byron was not an idealistic revolutionary but a rebel without a cause. Shelley’s utopian notions of free love may have caused pain to the women in his life, but he really did hope for a kind of communal bliss, free from crippling notions of sin. For the cynical Calvinist Byron, sinfulness was part of the attraction. No wonder he, rather than the more truly original Shelley, was the superstar: He challenged society’s norms only to confirm them. No wonder Annabella became embittered when she saw that all his talent and charisma had led her to nothing that was genuinely beautiful.