The Free Spirit Who Haunted Lord Byron

‘Lady Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit’By Antonia FraserPegasus Books, 224 pages“Mad, bad and dangerous to know”: Lady Caroline Lamb’s dismissal of Lord Byron is often quoted for what it says about the louche poet, perceived to be in the wrong, and less about the woman who stalks him in Antonia Fraser’s near-perfect biography.Lady Caroline showed up at all sorts of places to accost Byron even after he had flatly said to her he was not in love. She disguised herself as a page so as to gain entrance to his presence and would not take no for an answer.The scandal was not that Lady Caroline was unfaithful to her husband. Plenty of women in her own family and among the Whig aristocracy were flagrant indulgers in infidelity. What society could not forgive was her making the affair so public — eventually writing a novel, “Glenarvon,” that put the poet in his place.Eleven-year-old Caroline Lamb composed a poem: “I’m mad / That’s bad / I’m sad / That’s bad / I’m bad / That’s mad.” Ms. Fraser calls this a “wry knowledge” that would develop in time. The poem expresses a volatile sensibility, so romantic that I think it scared Byron, who settled for a more placid wife — but also one he soon separated from, realizing that he could not abide by social conventions any more than his mad stalker.But this is not biography as pathography. Lady Caroline could control herself for long periods. In spite of her self-absorption, she was a remarkably generous patron of artists and writers — such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton, one of the dynamos of best-selling Victorian fiction.Lady Caroline was also a devoted mother to her son, Augustus, who struggled all his life and died at 29. He had been slow to learn but probably not retarded — more likely autistic, Ms. Fraser suggests. Whatever her own worries, Lady Caroline always had time to look after her son.So it was also with her husband, William Lamb, who would become, after her death, Lord Melbourne, that favorite of Queen Victoria. Lamb, as he is known in this biography, remained for a long time faithful to his wife — why, the biographer cannot say for sure. He seemed phlegmatic but also loyal, and perhaps even still in love with his wife.As Ms. Fraser recounts, the Lamb marriage in its early years seemed a happy one. They were a companionable couple never relinquishing the marital tie. Divorce was, to be sure, difficult, and legal separations were more the norm for estranged husbands and wives.Lamb worried about political prospects damaged by a wayward wife, and he did eventually secure a separation, and yet the two remained on equable terms, sharing a concern for the upbringing and support of their suffering son, prone to what may have been epileptic fits.Mad seems the right word — better than manic-depressive or bipolar — no matter the modern tendency to try to diagnose even dead people, which Ms. Fraser cannot quite resist. Lady Caroline certainly could be sad, but depressed seems too strong a word for a woman of such gaiety and wit who loved to parody in her own verse the cantos of Byron’s “Don Juan.”Lady Caroline matters, Ms. Fraser suggests in her concluding pages, because she would not allow herself to be consigned to the role of mad woman in the attic. Society did not know how to value the independent behavior that put her ahead of her own time, deserving of friendships like that of the philosopher/novelist William Godwin, one of the staunch supporters of her antinomian sensibility.This has been called a “lean biography,” and so it is, with nary a wasted word, special pleading, or desire to make more of Lady Caroline than she deserves.What does Lady Caroline deserve? Certainly the attention of a great biographer who understands the life of a Miltonic subject. Ms. Fraser quotes from “Paradise Lost”: “What though the field be lost? / All is not lost, the unconquerable will … / And courage never to submit or yield.”The lines apply to Lucifer. Lady Caroline’s contemporaries might find the comparison, Ms. Fraser notes, “not too far-fetched.” But Lady Caroline is neither angel nor devil, the biographer concludes: “She should be remembered for what she was: A Free Spirit.”Mr. Rollyson is the editor of “British Biography: Reader.”

The Free Spirit Who Haunted Lord Byron

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