#glenarvon

[j-august]

Antonia Fraser, Lady Caroline Lamb

[artemismatchalatte]

Researching even more about Lord Byron, Glenarvon, The Lambs (Caro and William), and other studyblr/gradblr adjacent activity.

Here have a picture of Caro and William Lamb too, while we're here.

Yeah, so that thesis I was dreaming of and joking about years ago is a reality now. Get used to hearing about my weird ranting about Byron, his ex girlfriend and her husband because I know too much about these people. :P

BONUS: There will also be related Wuthering Heights and Emily Bronte ranting too. Because my project also involves her too. :)

[colemansdimple]

💜Glenarvon was Lady Caroline Lamb's first novel.

🟣It created a sensation when published on 9 May 1816. Set in the Irish Rebellion of 1798, the book satirized the Whig Holland House circle, while casting a sceptical eye on left-wing politics.

🟣Its rakish title character, Lord Glenarvon, is an unflattering depiction of her ex-lover, Lord Byron.

🟣It is the first novel to make notable use of the vampire figure. The novel contains no actual vampire characters but suggests that its title character has vampiric characteristics.

🟣The novel never explicitly creates supernatural events until the final dramatic chapter, but it continually suggests how the supernatural is born of the psychological terror an individual experiences as the result of transgression and guilt.

🟣The novel focuses upon two distinctive Gothic wanderers: Glenarvon, who is based on Lord Byron, and the female heroine, Calantha, based upon Caroline Lamb. She depicts Glenarvon as a type of vampire damned beyond hope while Calantha is redeemed and forgiven her transgressions.

🟣The most supernatural aspect of Glenarvon’s nature is his metaphorical vampiric ability to drain life from his female victims. While he does not literally drink his victims’ blood, he nevertheless drains energy from them, as Byron drained the women he loved and then abandoned them.

[unbearable-lightness-of-ink]

k babes reblog and tell me about the books on your nightstand (or wherever you stack books by your bed if you don't have a nightstand) what are they why are they there etc

[swamp-chicken]

lady caroline lamb was such an icon. she had the spirit of a real housewife 2 centuries too early

[saint-starflicker]

Happy Early Halloween, Chat!

By chat I mean @leiflitter (I know you're in output mode! You go, Leif's output mode; just courtesy-tagging 😁) @nbymop @rwoh @spacecasehobbit—and @wolfiso who might still be seeking out ghost stories.

I mentioned wanting to start a book club on the Fable app, and while I'm still discovering some stumbling blocks (app is sensitive to dropped connections so I often have to re-type and post twice after refreshing; the Book Quotes feature doesn't go beyond maybe 350 keystrokes; I never loved star ratings but the emoji rating is too limited and ambiguous too; only 10 tags allowed across so many different rubrics; filling out the Book Review form feels like being a research subject of a target demographic focus group, the Book Club thread-post format I think is less conducive to broader discussions about the books such as racism and disability representation and/or queer readings across a variety of works in the gothic novel "canon"...and then encouraging one another with writing, which was half my motivation for starting up a reading club in the first place, but there's not much wiggle room for customization...)

uh

maybe Fable's list function is better. Yeah. I'm gonna go with sharing my lists.

...I hope it doesn't force link-clickers to make an account before you get to see these lists, because what's the point of the list settings being Public if it's not going to be public Public?

And I don't put this up to imply that anyone reading must read all of them. This is more like, the book club could've been a wine cellar—so I appreciate recommendations because what I do have is still aggressively Anglo.

[screenshot of tweet by @MumblinDeafRo that says: "I said this before, but I try not to think of it as a TBR pile but more like a wine cellar. You try & time the right combination of mood, energy & interest, so that you pick a book when you have the best chance of getting along with it. That's what the writer prefers too." ]

Amontillado under Keep Reading cut.

Early Gothic — The Castle of Otranto (more inspired by medieval chivalric romances and I think the author even tried to pass it off as one; but in all my research everyone says this was the first gothic novel), The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (I think was still low-key riding Otranto's coattails in addition to taking inspiration from it, not that that's a bad thing), The Castle of Wolfenbach (now we're getting somewhere), The Mysteries of Udolpho (oh Anne Radcliffe we're really in it now, and by it I mean a literary genre that was new in like 1790 CE), Glenarvon (the earliest instance of a "Byronic" character I could find that wasn't literally Lord George Gordon Byron's self-insert), The Monk (of all the gothic novels that stirred up controversy, this one was the most stirred up controversiest), Northanger Abbey (oh Jane Austen we're really in it now), Fantasmagoriana: Geschichten der Toten (translated from German to French by Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès, not really on this list to read but rather to say oh George Gordon Byron we're really in it now), The Vampyre (the second instance of a "Byronic" character that I've heard about) and Frankenstein.

I elected to leave out a lot that was on Jane Austen's characters' reading lists in Northanger Abbey (Necromancer of the Black Forest, Carl Grosse's Horrid Mysteries, The Italian, The Mysterious Warning, Clermont, The Midnight Bell, and Orphan of the Rhine) because Northanger Abbey was already there, and to include some nonfiction such as Richard Hurd's "Letters on Chivalry and Romance" that was Hurd's observations on that genre's development, as well as Idée sur les Romans by Worst Human Being of the Century award-winner Marquis Donatien Alphonse François de Sade.

Midcentury and Victorian/Edwardian era Gothic — I didn't actually know whether to put The Last Man by Mary Shelley in the Early Gothic list or if 1826 can count as "midcentury". As it stands, this list begins with A Priest in 1839 by Jules Verne (written in the mid/late 1840s but not published until...1992? and unfinished), Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo, assorted novels by the Brontë sisters, The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Carmilla, Dracula, Clemence Housman's Werewolf, Frances Hodgson Burnett's sort of cozy gothic kid lit, The Phantom of the Opera and The Picture of Dorian Gray.

I really wanted to add Moby Dick and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs's Manor to this list but I think "nautical gothic" could practically be its own thing.

[89rooms]

"Tell both priests and parents," he said exultingly, "that one kiss from the lips of those we love, is dearer than every future hope."

Caroline Lamb - 'Glenarvon'

[neversetyoufree]

I have not stopped thinking about The Vampyre since I read it, so here's some extra trivia for y'all about Lord Ruthven's name:

VnC's Lord August Ruthven is, of course, named after the Lord Ruthven from the short story "The Vampyre." Written by John William Polidori and published in 1819, "The Vampyre" is often cited as the first piece of true modern vampire fiction. It makes sense for Mochijun to want to reference something so genre-founding.

However! The circumstances surrounding this short story (and thus the Ruthven character) are both deeply weird and deeply fascinating.

For starters, do y'all know the famous story about how Frankenstein was written? It started as a challenge between friends stuck inside due to bad weather—write a frightening story for everyone's entertainment. Mary Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelley) and her future husband Percy Shelley were there, of course, but so were the poet Lord Byron and his personal doctor: a man named John Polidori.

While Mary penned the beginning of one of the most famous books in history, Byron's own attempt at horror was abandoned partway through. He wrote a fragment of a novel about an aristocratic vampire and a foolish young man that traveled with him to Turkey, but he never inteded to finish it. However, after learning how Byron thought the tale would end, Polidori eventually came to write his own (complete) version of a similar plot.

The Vampire in Byron's fragment went by the name of Augustus Darvell, but for the majority of "The Vampyre," Polidori's titular monster calls himself Lord Ruthven. This name comes from the novel Glenarvon by Lady Caroline Lamb, a book that openly parodied and mocked Lord Byron (Lamb's ex lover) with its main character.

Now, why did Polidori name the monstrous, cruel, almost parasitic monster in his story after a parody of his patient and boss? That's because their relationship was deeply fraught. I am not the person to speak accurately on this history, so let it suffice to say that Polidori did not have a rose-colored image of Lord Byron.

Byron was famously promiscuous and often in terrible debt. He doesn't seem to have been particularly nice to his doctor. If you read about their time together in any detail, it becomes obvious why Polidori might feel the urge to mock him as a monster.

Polidori wrote a vampire that seduced, tore through, and ruined innocent young maidens. He wrote this after traveling Europe with a man who was forced to flee England with a rake's reputation and a charge of sodomy. He named his vampire Ruthven, after a caricature of Byron, because his own Ruthven was also based on the man.

In other words, the first finished story to create the modern trope of the aristocratic vampire was in large part a parody of Lord Byron. It is a monster inspired by him and named after a character that existed to sleight him. It is also based on a story that Byron wrote.

And in addition to this being generally fascinating, there's something so fun about this in the context of VnC.

The Case Study of Vanitas is its own story, but it's also so chock full of allusions and references that you could almost call it a pastiche. Half its characters are half-crafted out of pre-existing characters and historical figures, but they're only ever halfway stolen. There's always something new built from the base of the reference.

And in a big way, that's what Polidori did back when he penned the first piece of modern vampire literature. His first vampire was partly a reference to a real man, partly borrowed from a pre-existing story (Byron's fragment), and partly conjured from Polidori's own imagination. It's history and literature and new content all bundled together, just like VnC is.

Lord August Ruthven is a reference to Polidori's Lord Ruthven, who was in turn a reference to Lord Byron. He's named after both Byron's Augustus Darvell and Polidori's Ruthven, and Polidori's Ruthven is named after Lamb's Ruthven (who was also based on Lord Byron). He's yet another layer on this tower of self-referential Ruthven-ness, now totally abstracted from any real Byron traits.

As much as Mochijun is playing with the tropes and ideas of this era of vampire literature, it's really fun to see how her tendency toward allusion and reference is itself a nod back to vampire literature's beginnings. It's another way in which VnC slots in as another link in this 200 year old literary conversation.

Anyway, if you want to learn more about the bonkers story behind the Vampyre, here's a link to a not super scholarly but very entertaining essay about it.

[talesofpassingtime]

What enemy is so deadly as an injured friend?

— Caroline Lamb, Glenarvon   

[burningvelvet]

Messages from Lake Geneva, July 29th, 1816…

Mary Shelley’s Journal Entry from July 29th, 1816:

“Monday, July 29. — Write; read Voltaire and Quintus Curtius. A rainy day, with thunder and lightning. Shelley finishes Lucretius, and reads Pliny’s Letters.”

Lord Byron writes his friend, the poet Samuel Rodgers, informing him of his travels and asking about their friends in England:

“July 29th. 1816 —

Diodati — Geneva

Dear Rogers —

Do you recollect a book? Mathison's letters — which you lent me — which I have still — & yet hope to return to your library? — well — I have encountered at Copet and elsewhere Gray's Correspondent (in its’ Appendix) that same Bonstetten - (to whom I lent ye. translation of his Correspondent's epistles for a few days) — but all he could remember of Gray amounts to little — except that he was the most ‘melancholy and gentlemanlike’ of all possible poets. —

Bonstetten himself is a fine & very lively old man - and much esteemed by his Compatriots — he is also a litterateur of good repute — and all his friends have a mania of addressing to him volumes of letters — Mathison — Muller the historian &c. &c. He is a good deal at Copet — where I have met him a few times. — All there are well — except Rocca — who I am sorry to say — looks in a very bad state of health the Duchess seems grown taller — but — as yet — no rounder since her marriage — Schlegel is in high force — and Madame as brilliant as ever. —

I came here by the Netherlands — and the Rhine Route — & Bale — Berne — Morat — & Lausanne — I have circumnavigated the lake — and shall go to Chamouni — with the first fair weather — but really we have had lately such stupid mists — fogs — rains — and perpetual density — that one would think Castlereagh had the foreign affairs of the kingdom of Heaven also — upon his hands. —— I need say nothing to you of these parts - you having traversed them already —— I do not think of Italy before September.

I have read ‘Glenarvon’

‘From furious Sappho scarce a milder fate

—— by her love — or libelled by her hate.’

& have also seen Ben. Constant's Adolphe — and his preface denying the real people — it is a work which leaves an unpleasant impression — but very consistent with the consequences of not being in love — which is perhaps as disagreeable as any thing — except being so — I doubt however whether all such ‘liens’ (as he calls them) terminate so wretchedly as his hero & heroine's. ——

There is a third Canto (a longer than either of the former of Ch[il]de. Har[ol]d. finished — and some smaller things — among them a story on the ‘Chateau de. Chillon’ — I only wait a good opportunity to transmit them to the Grand Murray — who — I hope — flourishes. — Where is Moore? — why an't he out? — my love to him - and my perfect consideration & remembrances to all - particularly to Lord & Lady

Holland - & to your Duchess of Somerst.

ever yrs. very truly

BN

P.S.

I send you a fac simile - a. note of Bonstetten's thinking you might like to see the hand of Gray's Correspondent.”

[j-august]

Antonia Fraser, Lady Caroline Lamb

[artemismatchalatte]

The Connection between Glenarvon and Wuthering Heights is my MA thesis. This idea has been with me since 2020, a year before I returned to finish my MA in English Literature. With any luck, the paper and presentation will both be done before this coming Monday.

I spent close to two months reading this book last year. We’ll call it research for the novel series I’m writing. I’m very aware of the biases Caro had though too. I have other sources on Byron’s character as well. I wanted to get him right since I feel like everyone will want to chuck my book if he ain’t Byronic enough or just is not Byron. :/ 

Also this Review has spoilers for Glenarvon just an FYI before you read:

Copied from my Good Reads Review last month: “I read this because I wanted to know Caro’s point of view of her 1812 affair with Byron. This book was a (heavily) fictionalized version of their love story and how it blew up in her face when the affair came to light. Also if Byron was anything like Glenarvon, he seems like he’d be a pain in the ass to deal with. I did not find the character of Glenarvon charming in the slightest, though nearly all of the women in the story go mad for him. He annoyed me more than anything because he was extremely inconsistent. He would flirt with Calantha, beg her not to follow him, then he’d pledge his love to her and promptly tell her he was no good for her so she should go back to Avondale. He did this multiple times while she was having an affair with him (though it is so vague in the story). Honestly, it could have been a better story if the plots actually worked together. There were tons of characters who did effectively nothing for the entire story, which confused things when these incredibly minor characters were mentioned again every so often. She should have simplified the story. Really, this could have had more promise if Lady Caroline had an editor. She’s not a terrible writer- there were plenty of passages that were quite beautiful even. The overall lack of focus though took away from the story. The most interesting thing about this novel other than biographical background of the writer and her inspiration for the story is the obvious connection to Wuthering Heights this has. I felt dead sure that Emily Bronte must have read this novel before she wrote her own great novel. The three main characters (Calantha, Glenarvon, and Avondale) even fit the characters in her novel (Cathy, Heathcliff, and Edgar Linton). Their characters, relationships, and orders of deaths in their stories are remarkably similar. Wuthering Heights is much better crafted and the plots for it are fully fleshed out. So honestly you could skip this, read Wuthering Heights, and get a very similar story. This is also very much styled as a Gothic novel. So there is much drama, brooding, and running around rural 19th century Ireland during a revolution. Of course, Byron’s character is the villian though that shouldn’t surprise anyone since he’s the author’s bad ex boyfriend. So if you like Byron, you might not like this story. After reading this, I still don’t buy that Lady Caroline was as crazy as everyone likes to depict her as being. Similarly, I don’t think Byron is as evil. I kind of feel bad for both of them actually, since it seems likely to me that they both had pretty severe mental illnesses in a time when it was impossible to treat them. I’m surprised though that Lord M was cool enough with Caro publishing this since she kills both the characters representing herself (Calantha) and him (Avondale). I can only imagine how awkward that must have been for their relationship, though it was probably pretty much over at that point. Though she paints him as near saintly in his kindness and gentleness, she also shows that he was fairly passive and inactive. It appears that the portrait of him in Victoria is fairly accurate, at least in the eyes of his wife, who would know him well.” 

To specify, Caro and Byron both strike me as both manic bipolar people (bipolar people can favor mania/hypomania or depression depending on their brain chemistry). A lot of the sources I read for them just scream unmedicated, buckwild bipolar Romantics. Of course, there was no real treatment back then for their conditions which led them to be labeled “mad” by society as they proceeded to lead wild lives. I find them and other bipolar figures in history fascinating. 

This isn’t just my head cannon either; you can look up research that indicates that both Caro and Byron’s “madness” was in fact (in part) manic-depression aka. bipolar disorder. They both had other obvious issues as well but that’s the one that I can relate to and easily portray in my writing as a person who has also suffers from bipolar (hypo)mania. Reading Glenarvon only cemented that opinion of mine. There was no way that this wasn’t an illuminated manuscript that Caro wrote during a hypomanic/manic episode.

[gorbalsvampire]

Scottish Hydro by Andy Ferrington

Argyle Street by Thomas Mathie

Clyde Arc by Giuseppi Milo

An odd mix of high industry and entertainment, boasting one of Glasgow's largest venues and some fine waterfront hotels backed onto the long trail of tenements and storefronts. There may be multiple ways to cross the Clyde into Southside hidden underneath the domain. There may also be some tension with the West End proper, immediately to the north, as Finniston is claimed by the rogue Tremere styling himself "JD" and his informal chantry - indirectly responsible for bringing down Glenarvon's praxis in 2019.

[ladyaislinn]

quote by Rufus "If you don't get sent any scripts for months at a time, or when you do the scripts are all bad guys or men on horses in medieval times, it's hard to apply that fussiness,....

"Lord Byron"

Ironischerweise war der echte Lord M das Opfer des Archetyps, der auch Sewell wie angegossen passte – der böse Junge im Stil von Byron. Wie „Victoria“-Fans gut wissen, hatte Melbournes Frau, die anglo-irische Lady Caroline Lamb, eine höchst öffentliche Affäre mit dem Dichter George Gordon Byron, den sie bekanntlich als „verrückt, böse und gefährlich“ beschrieb. Das war 1812 Gesprächsthema und wurde 1816 noch mehr Gesprächsthema, als Lady Caroline das Einzige tat, was eine berüchtigte Frau tun konnte – sie schrieb eine Enthüllung in Form eines Gothic-Romans mit dem Titel „Glenarvon“. Dass Lord M diesen Skandal nicht nur überlebte, sondern inmitten des Skandals aufblühte – und sich, wenn auch nur für eine Weile, mit seiner Frau versöhnen konnte, deren Tod er 1825 aufrichtig betrauerte – sagt einiges über den Mann im Staatsmann aus.

Obwohl Sewell mehr als nur eine flüchtige Ähnlichkeit mit Byron hatte – die glänzenden rabenschwarzen Locken, die ausgeprägten Wangenknochen –, spielte er zu Beginn seiner Karriere in der großartigen BBC-Verfilmung von George Eliots Roman „Middlemarch“ aus dem Jahr 1994 den byronischen, Chopin-artigen politischen Schriftsteller Will Ladislaw. Es war eine betörende Darstellung, die die Bühne bereitete – und den Appetit der Fans anregte – für seine fesselnden Antihelden (die sinnliche Titelfigur in „Charles II:   The Power and the Passion“ von BBC/A&E, den brillant freimütigen Alexander Hamilton in „John Adams“ von HBO, einen ehrlichen, aber problematischen Polizisten in „Zen“ von BBC/PBS); und seine fesselnden Taugenichtse (den konföderierten Waffenhändler Graf Armand in „Die Legende des Zorro“, den kontrollsüchtigen Kronprinzen Leopold in „Der Illusionist“, einem schrecklich unterschätzten Film).

Sogar in Nancy Meyers romantischer Komödie „Liebe braucht keine Ferien“, einem ewigen heimlichen Vergnügen, musste er seine Freundin Kate Winslet auf der Weihnachtsfeier ihrer Zeitung demütigen, indem er verkündete, er würde eine andere heiraten. In dem kommenden Film „Judy“, über Judy Garlands ausverkaufte Konzerte in London Ende der 1960er Jahre, ist er Sid Luft, der knallharte Agent, der ihr dritter Ehemann war.

[alrederedmixedmedia]

Alredered Remembers Lady Caroline Lamb, Anglo-Irish aristocrat and novelist, best known for her work Glenarvon, a Gothic novel, on her birthday.

"My life has not been the best possible. The slave of impulse, I have rushed forward to my own destruction."

[pazodetrasalba]

Dionysian or Apollonian?

Dear Caroline:

Gossip Girl, I feel, is a cultural reference of yours that I don't find that appealing to explore, beyond a cursory glance on the net. I can assume from what you follow-up with that she represents the Stoic, Apollonian, 'Heart's Master' mindset; Caroline Lamb, the famous writer crazily in love with Lord Byron is more familiar ("mad, bad and dangerous to know"), and she's clearly on the other end of the spectrum, with passionate, theatrical, over the top, Dionysian 'Heart Mastered' mentality. Both seem a house divided, as incompatible as ice and fire, and roughly corresponding metaphorically to both.

In spite of your rationalist inclinations, though, I imagine you more pulled towards your namesake. Your erstwhile lover does fit the bill of Lord Byron's motto, even if quite lacking many of the poet's other attributes.

[side note: I saw that you had both Byron's Don Juan and Lamb's Glenarvon in your to-read list. I'll intersect here a rant at the difficulty of getting nice editions of some romantic poets and novelists. You can find either very cheap and shoddy, carefully annotated editions, like Oxford's Classics, or outrageously expensive ones with fancy artwork and/or complete works, like in Folio Society. My personal ideal is for something like Everyman's Classics, which are relatively cheap, hardcover, smyth-sewn, acid free and nicely printed books with just the plain text and nothing fancy. I really like having the theatre of my imagination projected on a relatively blank canvas. Unfortunately, Byron hasn't made it here. There is a recent selection of Shelley from the Longman Annotated Poems series, which is quite high-priced given its poor materiality, but which is partially compensated by the useful notes, I think]

Myself, my choice is generally that of the stoic, which is an ideal I strive towards, even if I find it a tad unrealistic, as we cannot switch off emotions at will, and perhaps it would even be an undesirable thing to maximally do. Channeling emotions towards aesthetic inspiration in artistic creation is something I have indulged in, but I feel that most of the good that can come out of it is for others, not for yourself:

sic vos non vobis mellificatis, apes;

sic vos non vobis fertis aratra, boyes;

sic vos non vobis nidificatis, aves;

sic vos non vobis vellera fertis, oves.

I find it a puzzle to understand how so disparate a set of attitudes could stem from a true (and same) aesthetic, even granted that it is a realm of subjectivity. Perhaps in this context, you are thinking about embracing and celebrating the diversity of human responses, attitudes, and expressions, and recognizing that there is no one "right" way to approach life or art, and that the true aesthetic is a reflection of the multitude of perspectives and experiences, like the multiple facets of a gemstone, make the world more interesting and colorful.

You definitely make the world more interesting and colorful. And I can definitely see you writing a Glenarvon.

Quote:

I possessed what is called the best of hearts -- a dangerous possession, as it is generally accompanied by the strongest passions, and the weakest judgment.

Caroline Lamb