In Byron's Wake

By Miranda Seymour

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' The Financial Times
'A gripping 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Release date: Mar 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781471138591

Miranda Seymour

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.

Reviews for In Byron's Wake

[dcoward_6 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm fascinated by Byron, his wife, and daughter, but I couldn't get into this book. I found the author's writing style to be confusing.

[gwendydd · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a dual biography of Annabella Milbanke and her daughter Ada Lovelace. Ada Lovelace is famous, and is the reason I wanted to read this book. Biographies of Ada don't talk much about her mother, other than to mention that she was married to Lord Byron, the marriage ended badly, and Annabella wanted to make sure that Ada didn't inherit her father's terrible qualities and therefore made sure she had good math tutors to keep her busy.I'm sure that, like me, most readers who pick up this book will do so because they are interested in Ada. The author, however, is far more interested in Annabella. This can be a bit frustrating if you want to read about Ada, but lots of books have been written about Ada, and Annabella is actually a very interesting woman in her own right. Annabella very competently stood up for herself when it became clear that her marriage was a mistake and her husband was a madman. She consulted with lawyers to get out of the marriage, made sure she had clear legal grounds for doing so, and did everything in her power to secure the future of her daughter. She went on to become an education reformer, using her fortune to fund schools for poor children - she was decades ahead of her time in her ideas about education. She did encourage Ada to learn math, but also encouraged her to write poetry: she wanted to discourage any tendencies to madness or mercurialism that Ada might have inherited from her father, but she also encouraged Byron's good qualities in his daughter, including the incredible sense of imagination that made Ada into such a visionary.The book tends to skim over Ada's relationship with Babbage, and assumes that the reader is more or less aware of Ada's contribution to the world of technology. Instead, it focuses on Ada's poor health, her relationships with friends and family, and her mercurial personality. If you're looking for analysis of why Ada is important, you will not find it in this book.Ultimately, what Seymour strives to do in this book is to rescue Annabella's reputation: after her death, the world was still in love with Byron and Annabella had a reputation for being a horrible woman who couldn't appreciate what a wonderful man he was and who accused him of some unthinkable things. Seymour demonstrates convincingly that although Annabella could be stubborn and unforgiving, she was also generous, very intelligent, and wholly justified in leaving Byron (the relationship with Byron, full of incest, bouts of insanity, rape, and manipulation puts a lot of Gothic novels to shame).The book tends to get bogged down in details... whole chapters are devoted to the development of friendships and business deals, and the events of those chapters are rarely placed in any context, so the reader is left to do their own analysis of why a particular friendship was worth including in such detail. This can make it tedious at times.All in all, I'm glad I read this because it gives me a better understanding of who Ada was, and now I am aware of what a fascinating person Annabella was and how Ada would not have been so accomplished without her mother's encouragement. I do wish the book had been shorter and included more analysis instead of detailed chronologies of events.