#lady caroline lamb

[majestativa]

She no longer had any illusions about him; she knew he was, like Lord Byron, “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” Now, her task was to figure out if he was worth keeping.

— Anna Biller, Bluebeard’s Castle, (2023)

[hotmonkeelove]

It's my birthday, bitches!

[j-august]

Antonia Fraser, Lady Caroline Lamb

[biromanticwritergal]

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. :)

[literate-bitch-boy]

One of Lord Bryon’s lovers - namely, Lady Caroline Lamb - called him ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’ and if that’s not life goals idk what is.

[almost-born-in-1893]

So... Have you heard about this hottie?

This is Lady Caroline lamb, who is best known for making this goofball

sound actually attractive and not just like a dumb frat bro when she described him as "mad, bad and dangerous to know".

Oh, this is Lord Byron btw. An idiot playboy who was constantly broke because of his excessive lifestyle as a gambling, drinking and home-wrecking whore. Of course nowadays he's just known as a "poet", because God forbid aristocratic white men ever face any degradation in their status for their own actions.

Anyway, "Caro" as Byron called her, was also his mistress while being married herself and did some crazy shit to get his attention after he moved on to his next conquest, like sending him some of her pubes, threatening to kill herself with a broken whine glass at a party and also breaking into his home and writing "remember me" in one of his books.

To which he responded with a poem of course (why be an adult about it if you can do angsty shit like make rhymes).

"Remember thee! Remember thee!; Till Lethe quench life's burning stream; Remorse and shame shall cling to thee, And haunt thee like a feverish dream! Remember thee! Ay, doubt it not. Thy husband too shall think of thee! By neither shalt thou be forgot, Thou false to him, thou fiend to me!"

Sure, dude, it's not like you knew she was married. As if you had a problem with that, but go off I guess...

So, what's the point of this story? I don't really have one. Both of them seem like dumb-asses, but we just love gawking at the affairs and scandals of rich, hot people, don't we, folks?

I'm just enamoured with the more human side of history and this certainly is some shit we'd see from celebs today. It brings earlier times a little closer and even though I don't really care for celebrity drama today for some reason I eat up stories like this when it's aristoracy in Regency England. Must be my Jane Austen mind virus.

[colemansdimple]

💜Cry for what you lost, for what you did, for what you didn't do and for what you should have done.

💜But don't cry forever, there's no way to change the past. Have courage to forget.

💜And strengthen your mind for the future, instead.

[footprintsldn]

Contrasting Cousins

  Michael Duncan gives us a sample of some of the characters from his Style and Scandal in St James’s tour which he will next be running on 8th October. There is a link at the bottom of the post if you want to join him to hear more! If you take a walk round St James’s, the Spencer family seems to pop up everywhere. The beginning of their association with the area came with the building Spencer…

[radedneko]

[With Lord Byron,] Caroline Lamb had found the great love, with poetry entwined around its very heart, for which her unfulfilled romantic nature craved. And she had also, equally importantly for her own satisfaction, found a situation with immense dramatic possibilities for the future.

~Lady Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit by Antonia Fraser

[burningvelvet]

It's funny you say that because this observation came up with at least one of his lovers, the eccentric Lady Caroline Lamb. They had an intense relationship and for various reasons he was compelled by everyone to break it off with her, which she retaliated against in increasingly bizarre ways. Byron writing to his friend Lady Melbourne about Lamb, Jan 4 1813:

"She is perfectly at liberty to dispose of her necklaces &c. to "Grimaldi��� [a well known Italian clown of the time] if she pleases, & to put whatever motto she may devise on her “livery buttons” this last she will understand but as you probably may not – it is as well to say that one of her amusements by her own account has been engraving on the said “buttons” Ne “Crede Byron” an interesting addition to the motto of my family which thus atones for its degradation in my acquaintance with her."

As proof, here is a locket he gave her which originally beared the motto before she had it re-engraved with "ne crede Byron." Before that, she had inserted a copy of a portrait of his into it and engraved the blank side with a loving note, as described in the below excerpt from Lamb's 2015 biography by Douglass. Also, note that Lamb and Byron got back together after all of this... because that's exactly the type of crazy, dramatic, aristocratic, Romantic era writers they were!

Some of the surviving clothes and personal belongings of Lord Byron (1788 - 1824)

1) a favorite white waistcoat originally belonging to King George II (1683 - 1760) bearing their shared initials; Byron wore this on his wedding day

2) a red embroidered jacket from Albania

3) a green fur-lined jacket given to him by Edward Trelawny

4) a linen undershirt of his which Lady Byron kept after their separation

5) a gold embroidered vest from Albania

6) a ring, thought to be his engagement ring

7) a pocket-watch bearing the Byron family crest

8) pair of boxing gloves; pugilism was big in 1800s london & like many male aristocrats at the time, Byron took lessons at the academy of famous boxing champion John Jackson

9) a small infant’s orthopedic boot; one of the many unsuccessful attempts to treat the congenital deformity of his leg & lifelong limp

10) a 32in/83cm belt with the head of Nike/Victory worn in his last months in Greece during the Revolution; a popular symbol during the war.

[j-august]

Antonia Fraser, Lady Caroline Lamb

[proselles]

107,680 minutes.

[eternal--returned]

Cynthia Grow ֍ Love Letters - Lord Byron to Lady Caroline Lamb, April 1812 (2024)

[bitterkarella]

Midnight Pals: Ladies of Llangollen

Mary Shelley: sup fuckers Shelley: what's going on here Lord Byron: [tossing hair] ah mary what a vision you are Lord Byron: [tossing hair] percy and i were just about to visit the ladies of llangollen Shelley: why are my boyfriends sneaking around together behind my back

Mary Shelley: what the hell is this ladies of llangollen bullshit Lord Byron: [tossing hair] ah see mary it's a most curious thing Byron: [tossing hair] two women living together Byron: [tossing hair] science simply can't explain it Mary Shelley: they're lesbians byron

Byron: [tossing hair] no see it's these 2 women living together Byron: [tossing hair] and their lady servant too Byron: [tossing hair] explain that! Mary Shelley: what's so hard to understand? it's a fuckin polycule Mary Shelley: we're literally in one

Lord Byron: [tossing hair] lesbians? Byron: [tossing hair] oh ho ho only cuz they haven't met me yet! Byron: [tossing hair] isn't that right percy old man? Percy Shelley: yes dear

Byron: [tossing hair] now we're off! Mary Shelley: why're you going all the way to llangollen Mary Shelley: we got perfectly good lesbians at home Byron: [tossing hair] what? Mary Shelley: you heard me fucker

Mary Shelley: byron are you just going to llangollen to hide from your ex girlfriend Byron: [tossing hair] ha ha mary what a ridiculous notion Byron: [tossing hair] ha ha just uh Byron: [tossing hair] ridiculous

Mary Shelley: so it wouldn't bother you if caroline lamb also visited the ladies of llangollen then Byron: [tossing hair] it wouldn't bother me at all Byron: [pausing mid hair toss] why? is she there? what did you hear?

[at llangollen] Byron: [tossing hair] delightfully devilish byron, caroline lamb will never think to look for you here Caroline Lamb: [barging into llangollen] WHERE'S BYRON Lamb: I KNOW HE'S HERE Lamb: DON'T YOU LESBIANS LIE TO ME Lamb: I CAN SMELL HIS AXE BODY SPRAY

William Wordsworth: i was so inspired by those ladies of llangollen that i wrote a sonnet about them Wordsworth: "there once was a girl from nantucket..." Mary Shelley: that's not a fuckin sonnet Wordsworth: uh excuse me i think i know sonnets

[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.

[biromanticwritergal]

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.