British Authors - 19th Century - Literary Biography, English Fiction & Prose Literature - 19th Century - Literary Criticism, British Literature - Reference
Byron Described Lady Caroline Lamb as "the cleverest most agreeable, absurd, amiable, perplexing, dangerous fascinating little being that lives now or ought to have lived 2000 years ago." That was at first. Later, he called her a "monster." She in turn called him "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." Caroline is usually portrayed as a spiteful nymphomaniac. In her affair with Byron, she is depicted as an adulteress whose obsession drove him wild and drove her crazy. Some biographers have gone so far as to suggest that this author of "hysterical" novels such as Glenarvon (1816) should have been beaten regularly. Paul Douglass shows how childhood traumas produced the so-called "erotomania" that focused Caroline's obsession on Byron and caused her, like him, to descend into drug abuse and madness. She emerges as a troubled but loving mother who sacrificed to make a happy life for her mentally retarded, epileptic son Augustus. Claiming that her pursuit of Byron was as much literary as libidinous, Douglass illumines her novels and poetry, her literary friendships, and the lifelong support she received from her husband William Lamb (first Prime' Minister under Queen Victoria), her cousin the Duke of Devonshire, and her publisher John Murray.
About the Author, Paul Douglass
Paul Douglass is Professor of English and American Literature at San Jose State University, where for six years he chaired the department. He is the author of Bergson, Eliot, and American Literature (1986), and the editor (with Frederick Burwick) of The Crisis in Modernism (1992) and A Selection of Hebrew Melodies, Ancient and Modern, by Isaac Nathan and Lord Byron, a facsimile edition (1988). His essays and reviews have appeared in Keats-Shelley Journal, European Romantic Review, The Byron Journal, and Newstead Abbey Byron Society Review.
Lady Caroline Lamb is best known as Byron's most clinging ex-lover, notorious for sending him clippings of her pubic hair and for her portrait of him in her scandalous first novel, Glenarvon. Without descending into psychobabble, Douglass, a professor of English and American literature at San Jose State University, reveals the stresses of his subject's childhood, including a mother who was almost always ill or in the midst of an affair. He gives a sympathetic though unsentimental account of Caroline's adult mania and addictions to drugs and alcohol. He evokes her stoically reserved husband, William Lamb, later prime minister of England, telling in intricate detail the chilling story of his family's numerous attempts to separate Caroline from him. To his credit, Douglass does not allow Byron to dominate the narrative. But he maintains that Byron's influence made Caroline write her novels, describing her literary ambition as a form of misguided psychological transference. Douglass faithfully catalogues the content of Caroline's three gothic novels, although some readers may find his attention to detail a little wearisome. Constructing his narrative largely from letters and diaries, Douglass provides a richly textured account of 19th-century aristocratic life, with all its sordid liaisons and backstabbing: a world in which the eccentrically emotive and indiscreet Caroline was all too vulnerable. Illus. not seen by PW. (Oct. 13) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
