14

THE LOST CHAPTER

It was in 1853 after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin had rocketed Harriet Beecher Stowe to international renown that Stowe traveled to Europe for the first time. She was forty years old and had become as famous as Lord Byron when he was twenty-four. Every important person of progressive sentiment wished to meet her. At a London gathering of notables: “All my attention was fixed principally on Lady Byron. She was at this time sixty-one years of age, but still had, to a remarkable degree, that personal attraction which is commonly considered to belong only to youth and beauty.”

Stowe and Lady Byron were already in correspondence. Both abolitionists, they helped the fugitive slaves Ellen and William Craft escape to England, as the Crafts remembered in Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom.

The Crafts had first escaped from Macon, Georgia, in a most imaginative way. Ellen was white enough to pass, while husband William was dark-skinned. On a Christmas Day half holiday, William disguised his wife as a disabled and bandaged young white gentleman in a top hat who needed his slave’s assistance in order to travel north. Since slaves were legally barred from learning to read and write, the gentleman’s bandaged hand was given as reason for his asking other gentlemen to be kind enough to sign for him when necessary. The Crafts traveled openly, slave and master, by train and steamboat, and made it north to Philadelphia and then on to Boston, where William, a master craftsman, operated a shop and made furniture. However, the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850, and it meant the Crafts could be picked up and sent back into slavery. Stowe had contacted Lady Byron, who opened her purse to aid in their escape to England. Once the Crafts debarked safely, Lady Byron sent them to her Co-Operative school at Ockham. There they followed the Hofwyl ideal: During part of the day they learned to read and write; during the second part, William taught carpentry, Ellen, homemaking. After the Civil War, the Crafts returned to Georgia and established the Woodville Co-operative Farm School for educating and training freedmen, which ran for about five years. The Crafts were referred to as “our friends” in letters between Stowe and Lady Byron.

Seeing Lady Byron for the first time at that London gathering, Stowe wrote:

Her form was slight, giving an impression of fragility; her motions both graceful and decided; her eyes bright, and full of interest and quick observation. Her silvery-white hair seemed to lend a grace to the transparent purity of her complexion, and her small hands had a pearly whiteness. I recollect she wore a plain widow’s cap of lavender, which harmonized well with her complexion. When introduced to her, I felt in a moment the words of her husband: “There was awe in the homage that she drew; Her spirit seemed as seated on a throne.” Calm, self-poised, and thoughtful, she seemed to me rather to resemble an interested spectator of the world’s affairs, than an actor involved in its trials, yet the sweetness of her smile, and a certain very delicate sense of humour in her remarks, made the way of acquaintance easy.

Lady Byron must have felt immediately comfortable with the younger woman, for almost everyone else—including Lady Byron—mentioned an instinctive reluctance when she first met a person. They were both “little women,” by the way, each around five feet tall. Within a few minutes the two “were speaking on what every one in those days was talking to me about—the slavery question in America.” The American author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was generally besieged at parties and dinners:

Lady Byron maintained her good looks as well as her remarked-upon calm demeanor as she grew older.

When any one subject especially occupies the public mind, those known to be interested in it are compelled to listen to many weary platitudes. Lady Byron’s remarks, however, caught my ear and arrested my attention by their peculiar incisive quality, their originality. . . . I had no wearisome course to go over with her as to the difference between the General Government and State Governments, no explanation of the United States Constitution; for she had the whole before her mind with a perfect clearness. Her morality upon the slavery question, too, impressed me as something far higher and deeper than the common sentimentalism of the day. Many of her words surprised me greatly, and gave me new material for thought.

(Lady Byron predicted emancipation would not come without bloodshed.) The women were interrupted as the conversation turned to religion and in a subsequent note Stowe wrote asking Lady Byron to finish giving her views “of the religious state of England.”

“I look upon creeds of all kinds as chains,” Lady Byron answered. Creeds caused “much hypocrisy and infidelity. I hold it to be a sin to make a child say, “I believe.’ Lead it to utter that belief spontaneously. I also consider the institution of an exclusive priesthood as retarding the progress of Christianity at present.” She desired a “lay ministry,” she wrote to the wife of theologian and biblical scholar Calvin Stowe: “I ask you, my friend, whether there would not be more faith,” if “a wider love” superseded “creed-bound” sects?

Stowe was more than impressed: It underscored for her “Lady Byron’s habits of clear, searching analysis, her thoughtfulness, and, above all, that peculiar reverence for truth and sincerity which was a leading characteristic of her moral nature.” She “parted from Lady Byron, feeling richer in that I had found one more pearl of great price on the shore of life.” She returned three years later, in 1856, to establish international copyright for her latest novel Dred: “The hope of once more seeing Lady Byron was one of the brightest anticipations held out to me in this journey.”

Sixty-four-year-old Lady Byron was ill but invited Stowe to her home in London. Decorum was not needed between them, Lady Byron wrote, and Stowe was ushered into her bedroom:

Her sick-room seemed only a telegraphic station whence her vivid mind was flashing out all over the world. By her bedside stood a table covered with books, pamphlets, and files of letters, all arranged with exquisite order, and each expressing some of her various interests. From that sick-bed she still directed, with systematic care, her various works of benevolence, and watched with intelligent attention the course of science, literature, and religion; and the versatility and activity of her mind, the flow of brilliant and penetrating thought on all the topices of the day, gave to the conversations of her retired room a peculiar charm. You forgot that she was an invalid.

After that visit Stowe sent her a copy of Dred, “saying that I had been reproved by some excellent people for representing too faithfully the profane language of some of the wicked characters.” Lady Byron responded: “If there is truth in what I heard Lord Byron say, that works of fiction live only by the amount of truth which they contain, your story is sure of a long life.”

Struck by her mention of Lord Byron, Stowe told Lady Byron she had since childhood been “powerfully influenced” by Byron and how the news of his death affected her, “giving up all my plays, and going off to a lonely hillside—.”

“I know all that,” Lady Byron said, cutting her off “with a quick, impulsive movement. ‘I heard it all from Mrs. Jameson; and it was one of the things that made me wish to know you. I think you could understand him.’ ”

“With her pale face slightly flushed,” she went on to talk of the best of Byron’s works and the best of his traits. “She told me many pleasant little speeches made by him to herself; and, though there was running through all this a shade of melancholy, one could never have conjectured that there were under all any deeper recollections than the circumstances of an ordinary separation might bring.”

Soon after, Lady Byron’s health once more improving, she invited Stowe and her family to a private lunch in London, and impressed Stowe by speaking with each of her children separately. At a subsequent evening at Lady Byron’s home, Stowe’s son Harry was introduced to Lady Byron’s grandson, Ada’s first-born, Byron, Lord Ockham: “eldest son and heir of the Earl of Lovelace.”

“I had heard much of the eccentricities of this young nobleman, and was exceedingly struck with his personal appearance,” Stowe wrote. “His bodily frame was of the order of the Farnese Hercules—a wonderful development of physical and muscular strength. His hands were those of a blacksmith. He was broadly and squarely made, with a finely-shaped head, and dark eyes of surpassing brilliancy. I have seldom seen a more interesting combination than his whole appearance presented.” She expressed “wonder at the uncommon muscular development of his frame,” to Lady Byron, who responded that it accounted for many of his eccentricities. “He had a body that required a more vigorous life than his station gave scope for, and this had often led him to seek it in what the world calls low society.” At the time he was an iron worker on the railroad. He had laid aside his title, and thought of himself as one of the workmen. “The great difficulty with our nobility is apt to be, that they do not understand the working-classes, so as to feel for them properly; and Byron is now going through an experience which may yet fit him to do great good when he comes to the peerage.” Lady Byron was “trying to influence him to do good among the workmen, and to interest himself in schools for their children.”

She told Stowe she thought she had great influence over her grandson, “the greater, perhaps, that I never made any claim to authority.” One pictures muscular Johnny Okey, as he called himself, looking down at his small grandmother with a smile or a nod as she spoke of the peerage he would never have claimed—even had he lived. A drinker and a workman, Ada’s oldest and Lovelace’s heir seemed to have contracted tuberculosis, unless it was alcoholism that would claim him when he was in his late twenties. Lady Anne, the little sister who had idolized him as she eyed his mutton chops when they were children, nursed him in his final days.

IN SEPTEMBER of 1856, Lady Byron was well enough to travel to her summer home near Richmond on Ham Common and to invite Stowe and her sister to a luncheon. After it, Lady Byron was anxious to speak with Stowe privately, and she excused the two of them from the other guests. When they were alone, Lady Byron appeared to be repressing strong emotions.

There were rumors of a penny edition of Byron’s work that would include a biographical sketch once more casting Lady Byron as the cold, insensitive wife of genius. The introductory sketch would be needed in order to explain some of Lord Byron’s references to these new readers, the working class who, through a cheap edition, would for the first time be exposed to Don Juan, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and short works such as “Lines on Hearing That Lady Byron Was Ill,” written after Byron left England: “I had many foes, but none like thee,” he wrote. He went on to call his wife “the moral Clytemnestra of thy lord,” who had cut him down “with an unsuspected sword.”

Lady Byron believed she was loved only by strangers. Now these strangers, the many generations of young people she had led through education to meaningful work, the girls she had saved from the streets and gotten into Mary Carpenter’s Red Lodge, the striking workers and the needy whom she had helped to educate, would read that Lady Byron was a heartless, cold, unsuitable wife to a genius. The literary magazines and newspapers had cast her in that light for decades. What they did for the educated class, the penny edition would now do for the masses.

She had the idea of writing her memoirs before she died, she told Stowe. With a penny edition on the horizon, should she go forth as her surviving friends urged? If Harriet Beecher Stowe could read her older friend’s broad forehead—Stowe did attend séances—she would have understood that Lady Byron was hoping she had found her second Robertson, a writer secure in “the cloudless brightness of faith” who had an “original,” not a “secondary,” intelligence. That day at Ham Common, Lady Byron, sequestered with Stowe, went back a half century to when she and Byron first met. Two years after she refused him, Byron sent her “a very beautiful letter,” offering himself again. “I thought that it was sincere, and that I might now show him all I felt. I wrote just what was in my heart.” Stowe saw a moment of anger flash across her face. Lord Byron, she later read, had handed that letter to his sister saying, “A letter from Bell,—never rains but it pours.”

“And did he not love you, then?”

She put her hand over Stowe’s. “No, my dear: he did not love me.”

“Why, then, did he wish to marry you?”

“You will see.”

This was Lady Byron’s youth. She did not rush it. When she experienced how erratic Byron acted at Seaham while they were engaged, she went to him and told him plainly that she understood his exceptional nature, and if, after so long an absence, he no longer wished to be engaged, she would never blame him. His reaction to her words? He fainted dead away!

Lady Byron paused. Her words took great effort, “Then I was sure he must love me.”

“And did he not? What other cause could have led to this emotion?”

“Fear of detection.” Lady Byron grew pale. “He was guilty of incest with his sister!”

“What?” She had heard such rumors, but did that cause really exist?

“Yes it did.”

One had to understand his psychology, she told Stowe. Lord Byron had grown to manhood without a guide. “The manners of his day were corrupt,” she went on, explaining the morals of the Regency to this child of the Victorian age. “What were now considered vices in society were then spoken of as matters of course among young noblemen: drinking, gaming, and licentiousness everywhere abounded and, up to a certain time, he was no worse than multitudes of other young men of his day—only that the vices of his day were worse for him. The excesses of passion, the disregard of physical laws in eating, drinking, and living, wrought effects on him that they did not on less sensitively organised frames.”

Often he spoke of incest indirectly. It was no sin, he told his wife. It was the way the world was first peopled. Doesn’t the Bible say “all the world descended from one pair; and how could that be unless brothers married their sisters?” If it wasn’t a sin then, what makes it one now?

“Why, Lady Byron,” Stowe interrupted, “those are the very arguments given in Byron’s drama Cain!”

“The very same.”

When his wife pressed him hard on the universal sentiment against incest, that it was considered a crime, he “took another turn.” It was the very horror and the criminality of it all that was the very attraction for him!

But didn’t he faint? Stowe asked. Hadn’t Lady Byron just said he dreaded detection?

Her husband told her she could never be the means of detection: “ ‘The world will believe me, and it will not believe you. The world has made up its mind that “By” is a glorious boy; and the world will go for “By,” right or wrong.’ ”

Stowe couldn’t contain curiosity: “Was Augusta Leigh a particularly beautiful woman?”

“No, my dear: she was plain.”

“Was she, then, distinguished for genius or talent of any kind?”

“Oh, no! Poor woman! She was weak, relatively to him and wholly under his control.”

“Was there a child?” Stowe asked. “I had been told by Mrs Jameson that there was a daughter.”

There was.

On it went. Lady Byron recounting much, some of which Stowe had already heard from Jameson, all without a hint of Byron’s homosexuality, which may have been a greater “remorse” than the love he felt for his sister. Finally Lady Byron came to the advice she was seeking. Should she herself make a full and clean disclosure “before she left the world”?

It was evening by then, and Stowe told Lady Byron she would let her know what she thought in a few days. Stowe and her sister stayed up all night: “I was powerfully impressed with the justice and propriety of an immediate disclosure.” Her sister “on the contrary, represented the painful consequences that would probably come upon Lady Byron from taking such a step.”

Before they left the next day, Stowe asked Lady Byron for some memoranda and outlines of “the general story, with dates as well.” Lady Byron handed her a significant selection. After the visit, she followed up with a time line outlining the events in her marriage.

Stowe didn’t take days, she took months to mull things over. It wasn’t until the week before Christmas 1856 that Stowe wrote from France, letting Lady Byron know that she had changed from her first impressions. She now wished that “the sacred veil of silence, so bravely thrown over the past,” should not be withdrawn during Lady Byron’s lifetime.

“Leave all with some discreet friends,” to decide after her death. She would not have the woman “I so much respect, love and revere” placed within reach of the world’s “harpy claw” that pollutes what it touches. Truth will out, Stowe told her with confidence. “Such, my dear friend, are my thoughts; different from what they were since first I heard that strange, sad history. Meanwhile, I love you ever, whether we meet again on earth or not.”

Lady Byron might, after years of struggle, be able to say “Incest!” aloud, but she still could not ask for what she wanted. She needed another of Robertson’s caliber who could help her tell her story, to bring her many fragmented “Statements, ” “Conversations,” and “Interviews,” not to mention a plethora of important letters, into narrative shape. Whether or not Stowe understood her silent plea to be her collaborator, Stowe returned the papers, and Lady Byron accepted her advice.

Stowe did meet Lady Byron again in 1859: “That interview was my last on earth with her, and is still beautiful in memory. It was a long, still summer afternoon, spent alone with her in a garden, where we walked together. She was enjoying one of those bright intervals of freedom from pain and langour, in which her spirits always rose so buoyant and youthful; and her eye brightened, and her step became elastic.” When it came time to leave, Lady Byron took Stowe to the train station in her carriage. Stowe realized she had left her gloves behind and hadn’t time to go back. “With one of those quick, impulsive motions which were so natural to her in doing a kindness, she drew off her own, and said, ‘Take mine if they will serve you.’

“I hesitated a moment; and then the thought that I might never see her again, came over me, and I said, ‘Oh yes! thanks,’ and took them as a token of love.” Stowe had been right to accept those gloves. Her older friend’s days were numbered.

LADY BYRON’S granddaughter and namesake was her constant comfort toward the end. Lady Byron wrote proudly to Stowe that Anne stayed in London, to be of use to her: “Not ostensibly, for I can neither go out, nor give parties; but I am the confidential friend to whom she likes to bring her social gatherings. Age and infirmity seem to be overlooked in what she calls the harmony between us,—not perfect agreement of opinion (which I should regret, with almost fifty years of difference), but the spirit-union: can you say what it is?”

One can: Love.

Her grandmother’s constant affection was a counterbalance to Ada’s early and ferocious dislike of her constantly hungry, and at that time, “fat” daughter, whom she would slap to Lady Byron’s admonishment. One sees it so often as to wonder if it is a law of nature: an imperfect remote mother becoming a perfectly accessible and loving grandmother. Lady Byron complained of being loved only by strangers. She was loved unconditionally by her granddaughter, Anne Isabella Noel King.

The future Lady Anne Blunt would ride horseback, “the only woman in the cavalcade” through the Arabian desert. The Byrons’ granddaughter would cross “the Tigris, Euphrates and Kherkha rivers either on goatskin raft or clinging to swimming horses.” She and her husband, the poet Wilfred Blunt, a womanizer far surpassing her grandfather, would “set up the stud of Arabian horses” at their estate at Crabbet, saving the breed. She could still mount a horse unassisted at the age of seventy-seven. She spoke and dreamed in Arabic and died in Eygpt in 1917 at the age of eighty. She was buried “under the Eastern sun she loved so well.” Her drawings of exotic locales can still be purchased. However, in her early twenties, young Anne stayed put, the devoted companion of her grandmother.

“My darling suffered very much, except the few hours before the end,” Anne wrote to Caro George. “The end was in sleep, which passed into the sleep of death—gently and calmly.”

Lady Byron died the day before her sixty-eighth birthday, a few months after Anna Jameson passed. She lies buried at Kensal Green Cemetery in West London. Her stone reads:

Ann Isabella Noel Byron
Born at Seaham
In the county of Durham
17th May 1792
Died
16th May 1860

No forty-seven carriages in procession. No coffin weighed down by silver insignia. No regal burial ground or family plot. No “Lady Byron.” Not even a correct spelling of her first name. She requested simple interment at the relatively new, park-like cemetery in which some of Dr. Lushington’s family lay, and where she was consigned to dust. “Seaham” (she’d actually been born elsewhere in Durham) was cherished by her until the end. Not even her tombstone told her story.

“When I am speculating to little purpose,” Lady Byron wrote to Harriet Beecher Stowe the year before her death, “perhaps you are doing—what? Might not a biography from your pen bring forth again some great, half-obscured soul to act on the world?”

Harriet Beecher Stowe, who became the friend and champion of the older Lady Byron.

ADECADE later Stowe did pick up her pen, for Lord Byron’s Italian mistress, Contessa Teresa Guiccioli, at the age of seventy, published her Recollections of Lord Byron. By then Guiccioli was the widow of her second husband, the Marquis de Boissy, who reportedly used to introduce his wife as “formerly the mistress to Lord Byron” (ah, the French). Blackwood’s Magazine, an influential organ that had all through Lady Byron’s life ruthlessly parodied her for separating from Byron, realized the memoirs were, as Harriet Beecher Stowe called them, “twaddle.” Byron’s Italian mistress told “us nothing but what had been told before over and over again.” Still:

“There is something inexpressibly touching in the picture of the old lady calling up the phantoms of half a century ago,” not faded by time, “but brilliant and gorgeous as they were when Byron, in his manly prime of genius and beauty, first flashed upon her enraptured sight, and she gave her whole soul up to an absorbing passion, the embers of which still glow in her heart.” It would be absurd to criticize the book by the usual standards. As Stowe summed up the review: “A very stupid book” was praised by “one of the oldest and most classical periodicals of Great Britain,” on the basis of its being written by Lord Byron’s mistress.

In her bestseller of 1869, La Guiccioli had repeated every claim Byron ever made against his wife, but Blackwood’s defamation went further. Byron had labeled his wife his moral Clytemnestra, however Byron’s metaphor was too kind. Clytemnestra “only killed her husband’s body; whereas Lady Byron’s silence was destined to kill the soul.” The reviewer suggested it would have been a truer metaphor had Byron called Lady Byron his “moral Brinvilliers.” Stowe looked up “Brinvilliers” in a lexicon. In the eighteenth century, the Marchioness of Brinvilliers murdered her sister and two brothers, but it took her eight attempts to kill her father. Then she went to hospitals, poisoning the ill.

As Guiccioli phrased it, Byron’s wife was “an absolute moral monstrosity, an anomaly in the history of types of female hideousness.” Lord Byron, however, took care “to shield her from blame.” The review insisted: “There is no proof whatever that Lord Byron was guilty of any act that need have caused a separation, or prevented a reunion,” and concluded, “ ‘She dies and makes no sigh. O God! Forgive her.’ ”

The “heaviest accusation against Lady Byron,” Harriet Beecher Stowe realized, “is that she has not spoken at all. Her story has never been told.” The advice Stowe had offered her friend, to remain silent in her lifetime, had proven disastrous. In a nervous state over the injustice and her part in it, Stowe waited for a rebuttal from Lady Byron’s friends or family, or for the publication of Lady Byron’s memoir itself. Stowe was sure Lady Byron had written one. No memoir appeared, nor was there one word of defense. Lady Byron’s name was drawn through the mud again. The silence Stowe advised only abated the harpy claw.

“MEN OF AMERICA, men of England, what do you think of this?” Harriet Beecher Stowe cried out to her large audience as if the public were a trusted friend to whom she could confide. In the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, on her side of the pond, she wrote “The True Story of Lady Byron’s Life.” Lady Byron was being “branded with the names of the foulest ancient and foulest modern assassins,” while “Lord Byron’s mistress was publicly taken by the hand, and encouraged to go on and prosper in her slanders, by one of the oldest and most influential British reviews.” The truth was, Lord Byron had not been content “as the husband of a noble woman,” but instead “fell into the depths of a secret adulterous intrigue with a blood relation.” This unnamed relative was “so near in consanguinity, that discovery must have been utter ruin and expulsion from
civilised society.”

“An adulterous intrigue with a blood relation?” This was a bombshell. How could a woman put such a thing in print. The media barrage was immediate and staggering. True or false—and some considered it true—it made no difference. To the public, Harriet Beecher Stowe had fallen from President Lincoln’s revered “little woman who made the great war” to scarlet woman. Her stellar reputation was literarily obliterated in the blink of an eye. Stowe said she read none of the outcry, but she could not close her ears to its roar.

Lady Byron’s two remaining grandchildren were furious. Ralph attempted to suppress the reprinting of Stowe’s article in England by MacMillan’s Magazine, but it could not be done. Instead, he wrote a letter to the Times, not under his own name, but signed by the law firm of Wharton & Ford. Lady Anne, recently married, thought it another of her baby brother’s botches. The letter said Stowe should have hesitated “before giving to the World a statement which however it may affect the memories of the dead must inevitably inflict much pain on the living.” However, Stowe’s charge of a secret adulterous intrigue with a blood relation was not specifically denied and continued to produce media hysteria on both sides of the pond.

Ralph himself had had suspicions of his grandfather’s relationship with his sister since reading Lord Byron’s Manfred when he was twenty-three. Manfred was published the year after the separation and is a poignant—and unabashed—paean to the grieving hero’s tragic, incestuous love of the dead Astarte:

She was like me in lineaments—her eyes,

Her hair, her features, all, the very tone

Even of her voice, they said were like to mine;

And soften’d all, and temper’d into beauty;

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Her faults were mine—her virtues were her own—

I loved her, and destroy’d her!

In the early twentieth century Ralph would title his book documenting his grandparents’ marriage Astarte, a reference to his grandfather’s incest with Augusta Leigh. But thirty-five years previously, it was only Stowe who raised the terrible swift sword of her pen—twice. After she believed the uproar over her article had subsided—“I must say the storm exceeded my expectations”—she wished to explain her point of view more rationally and less obliquely in book form, Lady Byron Vindicated. She would “add to my true story such facts and incidents as I did not think proper at first to state.” Apparently she clung to the belief that truth would go marching on and that righteous indignation concerning slavery could be transferred to the plight of maligned women.

Not only had Blackwood’s castigated Lady Bryon by believing Guiccioli’s twaddle. The press had been unfair to Lady Byron through the years.

“Here is what John Stuart Mill calls the literature of slavery for women,” Stowe wrote. As far back as 1830, when Lady Byron defended her parents against what was said of them in Thomas Moore’s biography of Byron, Blackwood’s countered there were other widows “whom brutal, profligate, and savage husbands have brought to the brink of the grave,—as good, as bright, as innocent as, and far more forgiving than Lady Bryon.” Such a decent widow goes weekly to her husband’s grave. “He was a brute, a ruffian, a monster. When drunk, how he raged and cursed and swore! Often did she dread that, in his fits of inhuman passion, he would have murdered the baby at her breast; for she had seen him dash their only little boy on the floor, till the blood gushed from his ears. Often he struck her; and once when she was pregnant with that very orphan now smiling on her breast.” Still this widow “tries to smile among neighbours, and speaks of her boy’s likeness to his father.” “Her eyes brighten with tears” when she remembers how strong and beautiful he was on their wedding day. “That, I say, sir, whether right or wrong was—forgiveness.”

Stowe concluded: “It is because of such transgressors as Byron, such supporters as Moore, that there are so many helpless, cowering, brokenhearted, abject women, given over to the animal love which they share alike with the poor dog,—the dog, who, beaten, kicked, starved, and cuffed, still lies by his drunken master with great anxious eyes of love and sorrow, and with sweet, brute forgiveness nestles upon his bosom, as he lies in his filth in the snowy ditch, to keep the warmth of life in him. Great is the mystery of this fidelity in the poor loving brute,—most mournful and most sacred.”

If the best periodical in England’s best advice to Lord Byron’s widow, a “peeress of England,” whose husband they admit might have committed crimes “foul, monstrous, unforgivable,” was to accept marital abuse with humility, well, then what of women who hadn’t title or wealth? To put it in a nutshell, “If the peeress as a wife has no rights, what is the state of the cotter’s wife?” Lady Byron’s married life? “Alas! it is lived over in many a cottage and tenement-house, with no understanding on either side of the cause of the woeful misery.”

Stowe was no longer pulling her punches. She quoted Lady Byron directly. He “was guilty of incest with his sister!”

“Was there a child?” Stowe had then asked her friend. “Was there a daughter?”

Yes, Lady Bryon had answered, there was.

A second bombshell. A daughter, a child of incest? The newspapers ignited with the “Byron Mystery.” Broadsheets featured drawings of Augusta and Byron and Medora on their covers. Did he or didn’t he? It was as if what happened fifty-five years previously had happened yesterday.

Both Ada and Medora would have been in their mid-fifties had they lived, and both were more or less forgotten in 1870 before Stowe’s book came out. The publication of Lady Byron Vindicated fulfilled a wish Medora had had in her wild days back in London with her adoptive mother. Then she wished to bring her real mother to court to prove, through Lady Byron’s auspices, that she was Lord Byron’s daughter. Now the literary world and the public buzzed with that scandalous suspicion. Medora’s name was in the papers and on everyone’s lips. She had had “Byron” engraved on her tombstone in a remote village in France. Less than twenty years later, there was Medora Byron in print. Her half sister Ada rested undisturbed in the elaborate coffin that touched her father’s. It would take more than a century after Lady Byron Vindicated before Ada, Countess of Lovelace would emerge from the obscurity to which Medora returned.

Stowe’s book had its own strange fate. It reverberated “powerfully within the political culture of the American woman’s movement,” biographer Joan D. Hedrick observed astutely. For the public outrage unleashed by her defense of Lady Bryon in the Atlantic Monthly had caused Stowe “for the first time to think systematically about the issue of women’s rights.” Her subsequent book was particularly relevant to those feminists “led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who had made marriage, divorce and sexuality prominent topics of debate.” True as this was, Lady Byron Vindicated never reverberated outside of that circle: “The world may finally forgive the man of genius anything; but for a woman there is no mercy and no redemption,” Stowe wrote from experience.

“We have heard much mourning over the burned Autobiography of Lord Byron, and seen it treated of in a magazine as ‘the lost chapter in history,’ ” Stowe cried out. “The lost chapter in history is Lady Byron’s Autobiography.” Not having her life and letters open to the public is “the root of this whole mischief.” With that “I claim for my countrymen and women, our right to true history.”