Jel-y~yron (nee Anne Isabella Milbanke) (1792-1860)

The courtship, married life, and subsequent divorce of Anne Isabella ''Anna­ bella" Milbanke and George Gordon, the sixth Lord Byron, has been ex­ haustively chronicled, as has the life of their only child-Ada, countess of Lovelace. What has not been so well recounted is that Lady Byron was a poet as well as a wife. At thirteen she told her mother, "I composed a few lines last night in Blank verse, imitating Young's most melancholy stile. I am doubtful whether I have succeeded, as I cannot say I was in a very gloomy humour. The subject I chose was a lamentation for a deceased friend." 1 She was always a voracious reader of poetry and plays, including works by her father's favor­ ites, Shakespeare, Otway, Dryden, and Darwin, as well as those by Cowper, Beaumont and Fletcher, Jonson, Massinger, Hartley, and Henrietta O'Neill. She and her mother were patrons ofJoseph Blacket, the cobbler poet, with whom Milbanke exchanged verses in 1809, a year before Blacket's death at twenty-three.2 Milbanke attended Thomas Campbell's weekly lectures on poetry at the Royal Institution in the spring of 1812. At about this time, she first saw Byron at a morning party at Lady Caroline Lamb's, just after Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, cantos 1 and 2, had earned him overnight fame. 3 In their first con­ versation, on 13 April, they talked about Blacket. Lady Caroline subsequently sent Byron some of Annabella Milbanke's poetry, to which he responded, I have read over the few poems of Miss Milbank with attention. -They dis­ play fancy, feeling, & a little practice would very soon induce facility of ex­ pression. -Though I have an abhorrence of Blank verse, I like the lines on Dermody so much that I wish they were in rhyme. - The lines in the cave at

I. Letter dated 26 October 1805, quoted in Malcolm Elwin, Lord Byron's Wife (New York, 1962), 79. 2. Ibid., 80-84. 3. The party took place on 25 March 1812 (ibid., ro5). 170 Lady Byron

Seaham have a turn of thought which I cannot sufficiently commend & here I am at least candid as my own opinions differ upon such subjects. -The first stanza is very good indeed, & the others with a few slight alterations might be rendered equally excellent. -The last are smooth & pretty. -But these are all, has she no others?-She certainly is a very extraordinary girl, who would imagine so much strength & variety of thought under that placid counte­ nance? ... I have no hesitation in saying that she has talents, which were it proper or requisite to indulge, would have led to distinction. -A friend of mine (fifty years old & an author but not Rogers) has just been here, as there is no name to the M.S.S. I shewed them to him, & he was much more en­ thusiastic in his praises than I have been. - He thinks them beautiful; I shall content myself with observing that they are better much better than anything of Miss M's protegee Blacket. You will say as much of this to Miss M. as you think proper. - I say all this very sincerely, I have no desire to be better ac­ quainted with Miss Milbank, she is too good for a fallen spirit to know or wish to know, & I should like her more if she were less perfect.4

On 30 November 1813 Byron described Milbanke in his journal as "a poet­ ess-a mathematician - a metaphysician, and yet, withal, very kind, gener­ ous, and gentle, with very little pretension. Any other head would be turned with half her acquisitions, and a tenth of her advantages." 5 Nearly a year later, in a letter of October 1814, shortly before her marriage, Milbank.e implicitly acknowledged the dual dimensions of her literary status: "I could never have married to please my friends .... I have become so notorious by the reflected light of fame,-and I amuse myself with thinking how many good sort ef people will pity me - 'Poor thing!__:_ Well, I did not think she would have been dazzled at last by Talent-But they say she had always a little romantic turn for poetry herself': -So they will conclude it to be an alliance of the Muses." 6 Shortly after the marriage, John Murray, Byron's publisher, wrote to James Hogg, "Could you not write a poetical epistle, a lively one, to Lady Byron - she is a good mathematician, writes poetry, understands French, Italian, Latin and Greek-and tell her that as she has prevented Lord B. from fulfilling his promise to you, she is bound to insist upon its execution, and to add a poem of her own to it by way of interest." 7 Lady Byron continued to write verse during her marriage. One poem, dated 15 December 1815, five days

4. Lord Byron to Lady Caroline Lamb, l May 1812, in "Famous in my Time," vol. 2 of Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 175-76. 5. ''Alas! The Love of Women!" vol. 3 of Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), 227. 6. Quoted by permission of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin (shelfmark Byron, GGNB, Misc I, Letters). 7. Samuel Smiles, A Publisher and his Friends: Memoir and Correspondem:e of the Late John Murray, 2 vols. (London and New York, 1891), l :347. Lady Byron 171 after Ada's birth, bears the telling title "On a Mother Being Told She Was an Unnatural One." In another of the same period, entitled ''A Contemplation of the Future," she writes: No, no-it will not break-this heart Will labour still to beat; Tho' now as free from pause or start As in its winding-sheet The heavy pulse moves changeless on, The ebb and fl.ow of Hope are gone.8

The influence of Byron's sensibility is evident in a fragment dated 1 March 1816: And heart-wrung I could almost hate The thing I may not love, And ask, while shuddering o'er its fate, If pity dwelt above.9 After their separation, and, indeed, until the end of her life, Lady Byron's poetry reflected her continuing preoccupation with what became the cen­ tral event in her life, her break with Lord Byron. She replied to his poem "Fare Thee Well," which he wrote during their separation and sent to her on 20 March 1816, with her own twenty-three-stanza poem dated 29 April 1816, "On the Words 'Fare Thee Well, by Thee Forsaken.'" A love poem alleging that the separation had been caused by treachery, it imagines his penitent return to her, closing with the following stanzas: But it must come-thine hour of tears, When self-adoring pride shall bow­ And thou shalt own my "blighted years," The fate that thou infl.ictest-thou!

Thy virtue-but from ruin still Shall rise a wan and drooping peace, With pardon for unmeasured ill, And Pity's tears-if Love's must cease! 10 Richard Edwards not only pirated Byron's poem but published her answer as Lady Byron's Responsive "Fare Thee Well"; it was popular enough to enjoy a

8. Quoted in Ethel Colburn Mayne, The Life and Letters of Anne Isabella Lady Noel Byron, from Unpublished Papers in the Possession of the Late Ralph, Earl of Lovelace (New York, 1929), 233. Elwin, in Lord Byron's Wife, quotes from other poems of this period: "A Sister's Sentiments," which he believes was written about September 1815 (381), and one beginning "Can this mean peace? the calmness of the good?" (401 ). 9. Quoted in Mayne, Life and Letters, 233. IO. Quoted in Elwin, Lord Byron's Wife, 470. See also Mayne, Life and Letters, 234. 172 Lady Byron

third edition and also became a favorite in the handwritten album books of the period.11 Lady Byron sent Theresa Villiers the poem entitled "To Ada" on the child's first birthday, adding, "It has occurred to me that [these lines] might be mis­ understood, as if they expressed a wish that she were with her father, such as he is; when on the contrary, I consider her as fatherless." 12 Though controversy surrounded Lady Byron throughout her life, it did not prevent her from maintaining a wide circle of literary friends. She was close to Sarah Siddons,13 corresponded with William Frend from the time she was fourteen until his death, thirty-five years later, and knew Lady Ann Lindsay, Anna Jameson, Caroline Norton, Maria Edgeworth, Harriet Mar­ tineau, Joanna Baillie, Amelia Opie, Charles Babbage, the duchess of Devon­ shire, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who published a vindication of her in 1870. Most of Lady Byron's poems remain unpublished to the present day, though some enjoyed wide private circulation. The Harry Ransom Humanities Re­ search Center at the University of Texas at Austin owns a dozen manuscript poems in the hand of Lady Byron.14

TEXT USED: "To Ada,'' manuscript dated IO December 1816 in Augusta Leigh's com­ monplace book, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, shelfmark Leigh AMR MISC B.

11. Samuel C. Chew, Byron in England: His Fame and After-Fame (London, 1924), 21-22. Plummer and Brewis published in the same year A Reply to Fare Thee Well!!! Lines Addressed to Lord Byron. Also "To a Sleeping Infant," by the Same. R. S. Kirby brought out another edition in 1816. 12. Quoted in Mayne, Life and Letters, 262. Mayne also publishes poems entitled "Lines Supposed to be Spoken at the Grave of Dermody" (12), "On Seaham-1817" (272), ''Ada's Guitar-1832" (334), "The Byromania" (44), and several untitled poems (96, 124, 173, 192-93, 278-79, 3II). 13. Milbanke told Byron on 16 October 1814 that "since I was twelve years old she (Siddons] has loved me with maternal anxiety" (quoted in Mayne, 464). 14. These poems include "To Ada;' "To the Widow;' "On Reading Lines to ---'s Mem­ ory;' "To Mrs. Henry Siddons," "To Georgiana;' "Sounds from the Shore," "Sonnet on Reuben's Picture," "The Minister," "In Answer to Some Lines by ---;· "As One in Suffering All Who Suffers Nothing," one beginning "I look'd on those ruins with youthful eyes," and another be­ ginning "Oh no! 'tis not the stranger's hand;' apparently titled in a copy in the Lovelace Papers "Ada's Guitar-1832" (Mayne, 334; Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin (shelfmarks Byron, GGNB, Misc I; Byron, GGNB, Misc IX; Byron Letters IIIB; Byron, GGNB, Misc IX]). Augusta Leigh's commonplace book also contains poems by Lady Byron, including "To Ada," and is shelfmarked Leigh AMR, Misc B. Lady Byron 173

To Ada

Thine is the smile and thine the bloom When Hope might image ripened Charms But mine is fraught with memory's gloom Thou art not in a Father's arms!

And there I could have loved thee most And there have felt thou wert so dear That though my worldly all were lost, My heart had found a world more near!•

What art thou now? a monument That rose to weep o'er buried Love­ IO A fond & filial mourner sent, To dream of ties restored above-

Thou Dove! who may'st not find a restt Save in one frail and shattered bark! A lonely Mother's bleeding breast­ May Heaven provide a surer ark!

To bear thee over Sorrow's waves Which deluge all of realms below Till thou the child of Him who saves A holier Ararat shall know! 20

Nor deem me heedless-if for thee:!: No earthly wish now claims a part Too dear such wish - too vain to me - Thou art not near a Father's heart! (wr. IO December r8r6)

16 ark] See Gen. 6-9. 20 Ararat] According to Gen. 8 :4, the place where Noah's ark came to rest after the Flood. 174 Lady Byron

*In the copy in the Lovelace Papers this line reads, "I still had felt my life is here!" (Mayne, Life and Letters, 262). t In the copy of this poem in the Lovelace Papers this line reads, "Thou father­ less-who mayst not rest." The third line of this stanza reads, ''A lonely Mother's offered breast-" (ibid.). +In the copy in the Lovelace Papers this line reads, "Nor think me frozen, if for thee" (ibid., 263).