He became the hero of fashionable society, and irresistible to women - who, mostly, had never met him. The (married) Lady Caroline Lamb was his biggest fan, declaring that ugly or not, she must see him. When she did, she decided "that beautiful, pale face is my fate." As, indeed, it was. Their very public affair was followed by tempestuous scenes when he tried to end the relationship. Byron had affairs with numerous other married women, and in June 1813 began a relationship with his older half-sister Augusta. Augusta had a daughter, Medora, who was assumed to be Byron's, though this seems unlikely.

Byron's private life was now very like those of the heroes of the verse narratives he somehow found time to write, which included The Bride of Abydos (1813), written in four days, and The Corsair (1814), which sold ten thousand copies on the day of publication. With their best selling ingredients of war, exotic settings and sexy Byronic heroes, they were best sellers, yet Byron was under no delusion as to the quality of these experiments on "public patience".

As if seeking stability, on 2 January 1814 he entered a worldly "marriage of reason" with the cool and rational Annabella Milbanke, who had previously rejected him. The marriage was disastrous, with Byron openly preferring Augusta to his wife. Shortly after the birth of a daughter, Augusta Ada, Lady Byron left him. The marriage had provoked intense interest, but not half as much as the long-drawn out divorce proceedings that followed. What was the mysterious crime for which she could never forgive him? (There probably wasn't one.) Gossips, in particular Lady Byron's lawyers, spread a series of wild speculations and rumours - he was accused of attempting to rape a ten year old girl, of sharing a bed with his wife and his half-sister, of brutalising and trying to rape his wife, allegations which he repeatedly and categorically denied and for which there is no evidence. Yet the damage was done, and the society that had idolised him now rejected him.

Soon after being seduced by the young Claire Clairmont, Byron fled England in 1816 to escape public ostracism and debt, narrowly avoiding the bailiffs who arrived to seize his property a few hours after his departure. At Dover society women disguised as chambermaids watched the disgraced poet leave. He crossed Europe to Switzerland, and in Geneva he found Claire Clairmont waiting to seduce him again. At the Villa Diodati with the poet and free-love advocate Shelley, his young wife Mary, and a doctor, John Polidori, there was much discussion and reading, and a famous ghost story writing competition, from which emerged the first version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Meanwhile English tourists, who had 'cut' the divorced poet in public, watched the villa through telescopes from the other side of the lake and circulated rumours about incest and four-in-a-bed sex games.

  < previous   next > Page 2 of 3

Comments