Never Too Late to Set the Record Straight: Reconsidering the Genius of Lord Byron

At LARB, a review of Julia Markus's Lady Byron and Her Daughters (Norton 2015), a new biography of Anne Isabella Byron, wife of Romantic poet Lord Byron. Anne Boyd Rioux questions "what it means to write the life of a woman who has been overshadowed, perhaps even to the point of total eclipse, by her male relative." "[I]t wasn’t the scantiness of the archive that stood in the way of telling Lady Byron’s story," she writes. "Instead, it was almost 200 years of mythologizing and misunderstanding, not to mention the powerful forces of an academic industry invested in the stature of Lord Byron as a poetic genius."

...When, in 1869, Harriet Beecher Stowe came to the defense of Lady Byron, telling Annabella’s side of the story of her disastrous marriage to the poet Lord Byron in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, Stowe was pilloried in the press, her reputation as America’s foremost novelist tarnished. Byron’s posthumous reputation was so powerful that it stymied all efforts to bring his former wife’s story to the fore. Now, 146 years later, Markus reprises Stowe’s role and vindicates the memory of the woman who dared to separate from her sadistic husband and remain silent about her motives for the rest of her life, despite the legions of Byron’s adorers who had insisted she was nothing but a cold, prudish, spiteful woman.

We live in another age than the one Stowe wrote in, of course. While Stowe felt she had to make Lady Byron an angel and Lord Byron a fiend in order to gain her audience’s sympathy, Markus provides more complex portraits. She points to the ways Lady Byron refused to look into her own darkness, even while she was understanding of it in others. And she peers into Byron’s own dark past, which included being the victim of childhood sexual abuse and covering up the shame of his homosexual affairs, to understand his later violent moods and disdain for women.

With understanding, however, does not necessarily come forgiveness. Byron emerges from the pages of Markus’s book as thoroughly bad, a man capable of great cruelty and deceit. Markus doesn’t address that larger question here of what we are to think of the art of famous men who reportedly abused women . . . . But she does ask us to reconsider our worship of male genius to the exclusion of all else and to listen to the voices of women that have been silenced by it.

Read on at Los Angeles Review of Books.