Posted on 03/30/2018 6:31:50 AM PDT by C19fan
Where else would the pretty 20-year-old Annabella Milbanke meet her future husband, the poet Lord Byron, than at Lady Caroline Lamb’s morning waltzing party?
That was the kind of entertainment laid on for this provincial heiress, one of the most courted girls in London, during her third London Season in 1812.
In her first two Seasons, Annabella had rejected several nice, eligible suitors. As Miranda Seymour writes in this gripping saga of a double-biography, ‘her heart was obstinately set upon the reformation of a rake’. (As I read that, I heard my mother’s warning: ‘Darling, never marry someone in the hope that you can change them for the better.’)
Annabella fell head over heels in love with mad, bad and dangerous Lord Byron. He intrigued her with his air of ‘quiet contempt’. The whole of upper-class London, it seemed, was infatuated with this fine-boned, pallid, promiscuous and sexually deviant poet with a limp. Elizabeth, Duchess of Devonshire, remarked: ‘He is really the only topic of almost every conversation — the men jealous of him, the women of each other.’
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Yes, and Byron never had any contact with his child. Probably fortunate for her!
Miss Milbanks meets Lord Byron at a party hosted by one of his famous mistresses Lady Caroline Lamb who was the wife of future Whig Prime Minister Lord Melbourne. Delicious!
His treatment of his little girl was appalling. Great poet, bad guy. As were many those romantic poets of England.
Such as the moneyed are considered civilized, but ere are little more than monkeys dressed in finery.................
And Lord Melbourne later became an influential advisor to the young Queen Victoria.
Amusing that Byron is still fodder for the tabloids.
Sounds like a good book!
A morning waltzing party? He had a club foot.
Rumor was, that be had a foot and a half. /s
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