In Byron's Wake

(Paperback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

A Sunday Times Book of the Year
Shortlisted for The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize

'This magnificent, highly readable double biography...brings these two driven, complicated women vividly to life' TheFinancial Times
'Agripping saga of a double-biography'Daily Mail
'A masterful portrait'The Times
'Vastly enjoyable'Literary Review
'Deeply absorbing and meticulously researched'The Oldie

In 1815, the clever, courted and cherished Annabella Milbanke married the notorious and brilliant Lord Byron. Just one year later, she fled, taking with her their baby daughter, the future Ada Lovelace. Byron himself escaped into exile and died as a revolutionary hero in 1824, aged 36.The one thing he had asked his wife to do was to make sure that their daughter never became a poet.

Ada didn't. Brought up by a mother who became one of the most progressive reformers of Victorian England, Byron's little girl was introduced to mathematics as a means of calming her wild spirits. Educated by some of the most learned minds in England, she combined that scholarly discipline with a rebellious heart and a visionary imagination.

As a child invalid, Ada dreamed of building a steam-driven flying horse. As an exuberant and boldly unconventional young woman, she amplified her explanations of Charles Babbage's unbuilt calculating engine to predict,as nobody would do for another century,the dawn today of our modern computer age. When Ada died - like her father, she was only 36 - great things seemed still to lie ahead for her as a passionate astronomer. Even while mired in debt from gambling and crippled by cancer, she was frenetically employing Faraday's experiments with light refraction to explore the analysis of distant stars.

Drawing on fascinating new material, Seymour reveals the ways in which Byron, long after his death, continued to shape the lives and reputations both of his wife and his daughter. During her life, Lady Byron was praised as a paragon of virtue; within ten years of her death, she was vilified as a disgrace to her sex. Well over a hundred years later, Annabella Milbanke is still perceived as a prudish wife and cruelly controlling mother. But her hidden devotion to Byron and her tender ambitions for his mercurial, brilliant daughter reveal a deeply complex but unsuspectedly sympathetic personality.

Miranda Seymour has written a masterful portrait of two remarkable women, revealing how two turbulent lives were often governed and always haunted by the dangerously enchanting, quicksilver spirit of that extraordinary father whom Ada never knew.

Reviews

A masterful portraitMiranda Seymour is a marvellous storytellerit is composed to a considerable extent of scandal, gossip and bad blood, Seymours book is hugely entertaining as well as formidably researched, and should not be missed -- John Carey * The Sunday Times *
It washer brilliance as a scientific and mathematical pioneer that defined AdaStruggling against her mothers domineering influence and the sexism of 19th Century Englandshe also found herself in competition for Annabellas attention with Medora, Augustas daughter and rumoured Byronic bastard. -- Alexander Larman * The Times *
Vastly enjoyableit is one of the many pleasures of this book that Seymour makes the reader warm to their inconsistencies, to all the inexplicable oppositions of character and action that make them so familiar and humanBrilliant, ebullient, eccentric, vivacious, egocentric and oddly dressed, Ada had her mothers discipline and her fathers volatility. -- Lucy Lethbridge * Literary Review *
'As Miranda Seymour writes in this gripping saga of a double-biographythe pretty 20-year-old Annabella Milbanke [who] fell head over heels in love with mad, bad and dangerous Lord Byrona serial womaniser who referred to sexual encounters as "hot luncheons""her heart was obstinately set upon the reformation of a rake".' -- Ysenda Maxtone Graham * Daily Mail, Book of the Week *
'Miranda Seymour issubtle, astute and experienced an historianand her zestful prose keeps the reader engaged throughoutin this deeply absorbing and meticulously researched biography of Byrons wife and daughter.' -- Rupert Christiansen * The Oldie *
'Its more than 160 years since the death of the computer pioneer Ada Lovelacecredited with everything from the invention of the CD to the foundation of Silicon Valley.Miranda Seymour agrees that it is not Ada Lovelaces skills as a mathematician that matter, but rather her visionary words, 100 years before the birth of electronic computers, about "a new, a vast and a powerful language". In her ambitious...dual biography of Ada and her mother Lady Byron, the power of Lovelaces imagination and her belief in a "poetry of mathematics" is seen as a direct inheritance from Adas father Lord Byron.' -- Mark Bostridge * The Spectator *
'There are difficult men, and then there is Lord Byronthe aim of Miranda Seymours new book is to put Byrons wife, Annabella Milbanke, and their increasingly famous daughter, Ada Lovelace, centre stageNot only were his wife and child still dealing with the rumours of cruelty, incest and sodomy a then illegal activity which, Seymoura wonderful writer speculates, his young wife may have enjoyed long after his death in 1824; they remained, in emotionally complex ways, in his thrall all their lives.' -- Rachel Cooke * The Observer, Book of the Day *
'On BBC4 she was celebrated as "Calculating Ada, the Countess of Computing"writing about Babbages Analytical Engine, whose potential she was the only one to realisein her extraordinarily prophetic "Notes"As for Adas mother Annabella Milbanke was married only a year before she left Byron, and he left the countryMiranda Seymour puts everything straight in this magnificent, highly readable double biography, which brings these two driven, complicated women vividly to lifeIn Seymours hands, Annabellas pioneering workat last assumes the status it deserves. Her humanity shines throughAdas own short life was colourful, chaotic and bedevilled by illnessThis is a very fine book. Written with warmth, panache and conviction, its formidable research is lightly worn.' -- Sue Gaisford * The Financial Times *
The story of this unhappy trio has been told before, but seldom with as much brio as it is here. Miranda Seymours particular aim is to rescue Annabella from over a centurys worth of bad pressOnly now, in Seymours careful hands, is she finally allowed to emerge as a figure who was neither saint nor sinner but somewhere in between. -- Kathryn Hughes * The Guardian *
A seasoned biographer, [Miranda Seymour] brings her considerable powers to the lives of the human jetsamleft to sink or swim in Byrons wake.' * Weekend Australian *
A nuanced account, attuned to contemporary preoccupations...Goethe thought the spectacle of the Byrons marriage "so poetical that if Lord Byron had invented it, he would hardly have had a more fortunate subject for his genius." Seymours account...shows that it has lost none of its power to enthrall. * Daily Telegraph *
Deft and compelling The late Georgians invented the cult of celebrity and Byron was its first and finest creation.His wife and daughter could not escape fame, they could hope only to avoid notoriety.Annabellas attempts to preserve her reputation and other peoples attempts to salvage Byrons have left apall of smoke from burning letters and diaries, further obscuring the facts that remain.Seymour carries off a delicate balancing act, combining the historians proper caution with acute judgements and a dashing narrative pace. -- Rosemary Hill * London Review of Books *
Seymour manages to offer a supremely even-handed and well-evidenced account of the relationship without losing any of the juicier details (Byrons affair and possible daughter with his half-sister; his predilection for sodomy; his seeming derangement in the face of wedlock)one of the many strengths of Seymours study is its illustration of these accomplished womens lives apart from the man who deserted them. Seymour is a master of character, and here she gives us two ferociously intelligent women who were deeply ambivalent about motherhood and their place in the male-dominated fields they inhabited. -- Corin Throsby * TLS *
Meticulously researchedA skilled and experienced biographer, Seymour weaves her way through cobwebby curtains of rumor and gossipThe combination of pure mathematics and agonized personal passions gives Seymours book an arresting power -- Jenny Uglow * New York Review of Books *
Miranda Seymour joins the dots with a wonderful account of the life of Adas mother, Annabella Milbanke, a society heiress and education reformer who outlived both husband and daughter. This double biographyis a scholarly treatment of sensational material, and its often as gripping as a soap opera * Sunday Times Books of the Year *
A skilful account of Lord Byrons disastrous marriage to the heiress Annabella Milbankeand then on their daughter, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, computing pioneer, who descended into drugs and debt * Daily Telegraph *

Author Bio

Miranda Seymour, author of the award-winning In My Father's House has written many acclaimed novels and biographies, including lives of Mary Shelley, Robert Graves, Ottoline Morrell and Helle Nice, the Bugatti Queen.