Review by New York Times Review
AS CALAMITOUS MARRIAGES go it Was, unsurprisingly, one for the ages. She early on pronounced him "a very bad, very good man"; he scoffed he "should like her more if she were less perfect." The courtship played out entirely on paper. Having requested an informal drawing-room wedding, he then steered clear of that room for months. When finally he materialized, he balked: "I like them to talk, because then they think less." He stumbled over his vows; she left the ceremony in tears. As they headed off on their honeymoon he informed her she should have married someone else. The next morning her ring landed in the fireplace. Three months into the marriage, miserable and pregnant, she invited an intimate to share their new lodgings. She did not suspect that her husband was sleeping with their guest, his half sister. Headstrong, well-born Annabella Milbanke had been clear about what she wanted in a husband. He should be goodhumored, even-tempered, attentive. How that added up to Lord Byron - among the greatest poets and reprobates of the age - is unclear. In his singular variation on genius, the author of "Childe Harold" was nearly capable of holding two different women in his arms at the same time. If Annabella was tantrum-prone, Byron was given to volcanic displays. What he wanted, he swore, was a wife to rein in his wayward passions. What he needed was a marriage with which to camouflage his incestuous affair, one he described (to his wife's aunt) as "the most enjoyable love affair of his life." No one had more interest in the success of that marriage than his sister, Augusta Leigh. In her last month of pregnancy Byron wrote off Annabella as "a nice little sullen nucleus of concentrated savageness." Even before the onset of labor she contemplated divorce. The baby was named Augusta Ada, in honor of Byron's sister, Annabella's closest confidante at the time and lodging with the newlyweds. Ada was just over a month old when her mother left her father. He would never again set eyes either on his wife or his daughter, who would make her name as Ada Lovelace. The poet lived another eight years, a cloud of scandal scudding about his name. Neither Byron nor his women have lacked for chroniclers; the combination of first-rate minds with fourthrate temperaments is irresistible. Wife and daughter have less often shared a volume. The author of lives of Mary Shelley and Robert Graves, among many others, Miranda Seymour artfully joins them here. Both women gain in the exercise, in part because of the historical rhymes, in part because of a loving correspondence complete with hand grenades. Annabella did not necessarily fare better as the poet's widow than she had as his wife. She had her hands full setting the record straight, which would become, as Seymour has it, "the occupation and obsession of a lifetime." For Byron's star to rise, hers necessarily dimmed. The potshots came from all directions; in their absence she could always count on a malicious relative to darken the doorstep. Then there was that unique parenting riddle: At what age do you tell your precocious child that her father slept with her aunt? Not early, it seems. Ada was herself married and a mother when Annabella came clean. Ada had intuited as much but had not known she had a half sister in Paris, the issue - she choked on the report - of her father's parallel relationship. "A new language is requisite to furnish terms strong enough to express my horror and amazement at the appalling facts! " she erupted. The discovery only validated her daredevil instincts and the determination to surpass her celebrated father. Already Ada was exuberant, indomitable, boundlessly confident. Afterward ichor coursed through her veins. She had been the kind of child who convinced herself at 11 that - with a year's practice, a set of outsize wings and a treatise on avian anatomy - she could learn to fly. To restrain her enthusiasms, Lady Byron introduced Ada to mathematics: She would soon enough swear that differential calculus made for the best company. Lady Byron succeeded less well on other fronts. Ada narrowly avoided a public disgrace at 17, when she attempted to elope with a tutor, following a season of intimate lessons in a garden shed; impetuosity ran like Class 6 rapids through this family. At 24, having mastered neither algebra nor trigonometry, she begged to throw herself into differential calculus. "It is no use," her tutor chided, "trying to catch the horizon." It would be in the horizon-catching department that Ada left her mark. Even while shackled to the past, this young Victorian woman was ahead of her time: In 1834 she began to study with the astronomer and mathematician Mary Somerville, who in turn introduced her to some of the best scientific minds of the day. Charles Babbage, then at work on his celebrated calculating engine, figured among them. With a poet's ability to connect disparate dots, Ada grasped that his invention could manipulate vocabularies beyond numbers, something Babbage neither anticipated nor recognized. His was not so much a calculating engine as a "thinking machine," Ada prophetically noted. She devised what some consider the first computer program, a work she presented to her proud mother. Somerville lent a hand as well in locating a suitable husband for Ada, perceived as she was by some as damaged goods. He was a bit of a stiff, with a barmy, overbearing family of his own. Lord William King, later Earl of Lovelace, had, however, been abroad during Ada's misadventure, of which he miraculously knew nothing. He had named the fields of his Surrey estate after her father's works. He was also an optimist: Alarmed by his wife's volatility, he trusted in her poised, coolheaded mother to keep her in check. Ada's enthusiasms nonetheless refused to confine themselves to mesmerism and galvanized frogs' legs. She soon found herself involved with the eldest son of a pioneering scientist, whom - billed as her assistant - she moved into the family home. Not only because of mounting financial demands, she developed another numerical passion: She established a racing syndicate. Her luck at the track ran out just as her health began to deteriorate; in a tawdry turn, she secretly dispatched her lover to pawn her husband's family jewels - twice. Ravaged by cancer, she died at 36, as had her celebrated father. Left to conjure with the fallout of her daughter's clandestine life - among Ada's creditors was her blackmailing lover - Annabella would survive her by eight years. Already she had learned a vital lesson: Never leave your husband's biography to his ex-lovers. She was to be slandered, vindicated, slandered again. Poetic justice proved strangely elusive, as even those who attempted to help often inflicted harm. Harriet Beecher Stowe inadvertently unleashed a series of new attacks in 1869, when her flawed article in The Atlantic Monthly caused 15,000 scandalized readers to cancel their subscriptions. Seymour is cleareyed but gentle, ably redeeming a steely, resourceful woman from her decades as a "humorless despot." For the most part she steps aside and lets these two forces of nature speak for their eloquent selves. The result is a rich narrative, though one that can leave the reader stranded among headlong peregrinations and pinballing emotions. Seymour's cast is so mercurial they change minds in midparagraph; mixed emotions are the order of the day. Thirty years after his death, Lady Byron remained of two minds about her husband. The problem is not so much a profusion of detail as the fact that in its midst accents and emphases appear to have gone missing; the wise reader will pack cleats and a compass. Nor are these two women who should be left alone with a narrative. Ada breathed her last on the night of Nov. 27, 1852. Lady Byron had briefly left the room. She found it unconscionable that Ada had slipped off in her absence. But she knew just what to do. In her account Ada dies a half-hour later, her mother at her side. STACY schiff is the author, most recently, of "The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal and Hysteria in 1692."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 11, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* We live in an age of celebrity worship, but Seymour's new book, following biographies of early race-car driver Helene Delangle and Mary Shelley, shows that obsession with the rich and famous is nothing new. The public's preoccupation with the lives of Annabella Milbanke (1792-1860) and her daughter, Ada Lovelace (1815-52), lingered long after their deaths. The material was irresistible. The young Annabella married the notorious poet Lord Byron, discovered his affair with his half-sister, executed a painful divorce, then inherited great wealth and became an influential social reformer. Their only child, Ada, was a mathematical genius who brought the steam-powered computing machine proposed by Charles Babbage to scientific and public attention, and her predictions of its potential have earned her the title of visionary prophet of our own technological age. Seymour charts the shoals of sex and class both women navigated as they pursued their dreams and aspirations. There's particular sadness in the foreshortened life of Ada Lovelace. Today she is revered as a female pioneer of computer technology, but in life she battled sexism, severe mood swings, poor health, and the entangling demands of life in Britain's aristocracy. They were an extraordinary mother-daughter pair, and Seymour tells their story with wit, smarts, and insight.--Mary Ann Gwinn Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this splendid dual biography of Lord Byron's wife and daughter, Seymour (Mary Shelley) brings these two brilliant, complex women to vivid life. Both women were cherished only children, endowed with strong wills and intellects. Lady Byron, nAce Annabella Milbanke, left the poet after only a year of marriage, subsequently building a reputation as a philanthropist and social reformer. Her daughter, Ada, inherited the wild, impetuous part of her father's nature, and was plagued by ill health up to her early death at 36 (the same age as Byron at his death). Before this, Ada showed a skill for mathematics and a genius for theorizing, producing a visionary set of notes on the possibilities of inventor Charles Babbage's "Analytical Engine" that presaged the rise of modern computers. Dramatically hovering over both women's lives is the long shadow cast by Byron's scandal-ridden life, in particular his incestuous relationship with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, and the existence of an alleged daughter; Lady Byron's supposed knowledge of this affair during her marriage provided the peg on which critics debased her reputation after her death. While remaining historically rigorous, Seymour's narrative reads like a superb, page-turning novel. (Nov.) c Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Seymour (visiting professor, Nottingham Trent Univ.; Mary Shelley) turns a critical eye to the women in Lord Byron's life. Anne Isabella "Annabella" Noel Milbanke (1792-1860), "one of the most coveted young women of the year," owing to her large dowry and inheritance, married the young poet; their brief union marred by cruelty and an affair between Byron and his half-sister. After the couple separated, Annabella ensured their daughter Ada never met her father. Ada, an astute mathematician, counted Charles Babbage as an academic mentor. Chosen to author an English translation of a French scientific article on his Analytical Engine machine, she hinted at the later invention of computers though the world "was not ready either for it or for her." Always susceptible to illness, she passed away at 36, just like her father. Seymour owns Thrumpton Hall, the ancestral home of Annabella and Ada, and laboriously documents the family history through private letters. However, an overemphasis on detail is this work's weakness, potentially overwhelming nonacademicians, with Jennifer -Chiaverini's Enchantress of Numbers providing a more accessible version of Ada's life. VERDICT A dense biography that loses some of its entertainment through its epistolary style targeting researchers.-Jessica Bushore, Xenia, OH © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The tale of one of the most disastrous marriages in English literary historyand how it reverberated through generations to come.Prolific novelist and literary biographer Seymour (The Pity of War: England and Germany, Bitter Friends, Beloved Foes, 2014, etc.) returns to the familiar Romantic era ground she covered in her 2001 biography, Mary Shelley, with this wide-ranging dysfunctional family portrait. Raised as a beautiful, pampered, privileged social princess, Annabella Milbanke married the great poet Lord Byron with the most delusional of intentions: She would reform the rake who famously seduced anyone who didn't seduce him first. However, no sooner were they on their honeymoon than Byron brought his half sister, Augusta Leigh, into the game and all but made love to her under the nose of his nave and oblivious bride. Annabella, who only dealt with the unthinkable when it became the unavoidable, fled within a year, taking along Ada, her newborn daughter by Byron. Her marriage made her vindictive and cruel; she could wield the unpleasant and unlawful facts as a cudgel against Byron and Augusta as well as their unfortunate daughter Elizabeth Medora. More than that, she raised and molded Ada by herself, with results that went well beyond her control. While she nurtured Ada's geniusshe was the mathematical prodigy who became the explicator and promoter of Charles Babbage's groundbreaking Analytical Machine, the forerunner of the computerAda was every bit her father's daughter. The self-proclaimed "bride of science," she supplemented her marriage with affairs and a disastrous interest in racehorse gambling; she also bristled under the restraints of her tightfisted and domineering mother. Seymour's great achievement is the resourcefulness and diligence she brings to both Annabella and Ada, complex figures who alternately invite and test readers' sympathies. Their inner and outer livesalong with those of dozens of others who populate this tragic farceare told with singular narrative skill.A top-notch biography. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
