The Life, and Embittered Loves, of a Romantic Poet

THE KINDNESS OF SISTERS

Annabella Milbanke and

the Destruction of the Byrons

By David Crane

Alfred A. Knopf

320 pp., $26.95

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"The news of his death came down on my heart like a mass of lead

Thus wrote the future Victorian sage Thomas Carlyle to Jane Welsh, his future wife, on learning of the death of Lord Byron in 1824, his 36th year, from a fever contracted while fighting in the cause of Greek independence. Carlyle's reaction was typical of the outpouring of shock and grief that greeted the poet's death. Although Byron is still famous today, it is hard to conceive just how large he once loomed.

Much of Byron's poetry (apart from his scintillating comic satire "Don Juan" and the occasional well-wrought lyric) may strike us as bombastic and hollow. Yet Byron, perhaps the least imaginative of the great English Romantics, was indubitably the most celebrated in his day, bigger than Elvis and Princess Diana rolled into one.

David Crane's "The Kindness of Sisters" helps illuminate the nature of Byron-mania. Crane focuses on the tortuous relationship between two women caught up in his spell: his wife, Annabella Milbanke, and his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. Byron was embroiled in a scandalous affair with Lady Caroline Lamb and was trying to put an end to her pursuit of him. More significantly, he had also become sexually involved with Augusta, so marriage to the youthful, clever Miss Milbanke, an accomplished mathematician, seemed to offer a way out.

But a way out of what? It is Crane's contention that Byron (consciously or not) was seeking an excuse to escape the "right little, tight little island" of England, and that a disastrous marriage was his way of forcing himself to take the plunge. This seems a trifle far-fetched. Wouldn't it have been simpler to leave England without going through all this Sturm und Drang? Then again, things were never simple with Byron.

Immediately after the wedding, Byron's first words to his new bride were: "It must come to a separation. It is enough that you are my wife for me to hate you." Although there were moments of joy still in store for his baffled but besotted wife, there were many more of cruelty and misery. Stranger yet was the business of Augusta, who at one point came to live with them. The sisters-in-law became close friends, joining forces to try and manage their difficult man. But Byron did not disguise the fact that it was Augusta whom he truly loved.