LADY CAROLINE LAMB

A modern reconsideration of the notorious life and career of the early-19th-century Anglo-Irish aristocrat and novelist.

Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1828) has been the subject of countless works of literature and film adaptations, her place in history both illuminated and sullied by her affair with Lord Byron. Fraser, the celebrated biographer and novelist, delivers a lean yet spirited account, offering further nuance to Lamb’s story within the thorny aristocratic society she inhabited. Narrated with dramatic verve and wit, this is ripe material for a potential TV series. Early on, Fraser establishes Lamb’s restless nature and eccentricities as well as her strengths. At an early age, she enjoyed a great deal of freedom, and she was exceptionally creative, well read, and multilingual. She was also remarkably caring toward those less fortunate and forward-thinking regarding women’s rights, occasionally disguising herself as a pageboy to gain entrance into male establishments. Because Lamb was prone to emotional outbreaks, Fraser conjectures that she perhaps was bipolar. At 19, she fell in love with and married William Lamb, an up-and-coming politician (he later became Lord Melbourne and prime minister). Within a few years of their marriage, Caroline got entangled in a brief yet passionate love affair with Lord Byron that would consume much of her future existence. In scrutinizing the scandalous nature of Lamb’s behavior, Fraser asserts how criticism reflected less on her extramarital activity, conduct that ran rampant among this society, than on her uninhibited publicizing of the affair, spotlighted in her anonymously published novel Glenarvon, a Gothic romance with thinly veiled portraits of Byron and herself. “It was the obvious connection with Lord Byron, calling attention to Caroline’s famous romance, which outraged the grand Whig ladies, themselves involved in endless extramarital affairs, to say nothing of mothering children by their lovers,” writes Fraser. “She refused to abide by the Whig code of maximum discretion—and maximum dissipation.”

A shrewd and sympathetic portrait of a fascinating, complex “modern” woman.