Lady Caroline Lamb: A Biography

Lady Caroline Lamb: A Biography. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004. ISBN 1-4039-6605-2

Reviews:

"Douglass’s insightful biography reintroduces us to a Caroline Lamb who is emotionally damaged, often egregious, but by no means the crazed flibbertigibbet of myth. He treats her as a woman of intelligence as well as passion, and above all as a writer: a courtesy anyone who has the discipline to write three novels in overheated circumstances certainly deserves." —Sunday Times ( UK)

Professor Douglass's riveting work, a triumph of scholarship and original research, is a much-needed corrective to the skewed portraits of the past. —Choice

"This professionally wrought biography provides a revisionist feminist view of a fascinating historical figure." —Booklist

"Has anyone else ever wished that Lady Caroline Lamb would attract her own Leslie Marchand [biographer of Byron]? Well, now she has a Marchand analogue in Paul Douglass, a biographer who pays his subject the compliment of taking her life seriously. . . a beautifully researched, clear, fair, sympathetic and fascinating account. I am willing to bet that Caroline Lamb herself would approve of what Paul Douglass says of her: for all her caprice and eccentricity, she seems to have possessed a fairmindedness that would appreciate Douglass's humane, carefully nuanced approach to biography." —The Byron Journal

"A monumental work of scholarship that illuminates, in a score of fascinating and unexpected ways, that famous woman 'of wild originality.'" —Simon Winchester.

"An exemplary blend of scholarship and sympathy, Lady Caroline Lamb gives us a vivid portrait of the life and times of a scatty, outrageous, self-destructive, and appealing woman, who out-emoted any heroine of Regency Romance, and actually snagged Byron. One reads the fascinating story with a growing conviction that the British aristocracy was almost entirely mad." —Ursula K. Le Guin.

"This biography does full justice not only to Caroline Lamb's intelligence, willfulness, and capacity to outrage her family and friends, but also to her considerable literary gifts and feminist politics." —Anne K. Mellor.

"A fascinating biography that treats the poems and novels of Lady Caroline Lamb with insight and takes her seriously as a woman, an author, and a passionate witness of the foibles of her age." —Jonathan Gross, DePaul University.

"Lady Caroline Lamb is a biographical triumph. Paul Douglass shows great sympathy and perceptiveness in his account of a woman hitherto most famous for her liaison with Byron. He persuades us that Lady Caroline played a role in changing the possibilities for women in the nineteenth century. And he brings out, too, the significance of Caroline’s own writings. Packed with original information and insight, Lady Caroline Lamb is, throughout, a pleasure to read." —Michael O’Neill.

"With the publication of Paul Douglass's biography, Lady Caroline Lamb has received what her life deserves: a thoughtful, scholarly, sympathetic yet penetrating account that neither reduces her to an unusually vocal and highborn bit player in the Byronic drama nor contorts her to an ideological exemplum of how women and their talents were repressed in Regency England. The result is a beautifully researched, clear, fair, and engrossing biography that permits a remarkable and complicated real woman, and her considerable talents, to emerge from the myths that have long veiled them." —Peter W. Graham.

"Before Paul Douglass's immaculately researched, sympathetic, page-turning portrait of Lady Caroline Lamb, it had been her fate to be as maligned by her biographers as she was by her own friends and family. Lady Caroline emerges afresh from these pages as a woman funnier, cleverer, braver, more gifted and more tragic than we previously had cause to believe, and while her frantic affair with Byron remains the central moment of her life we can no longer say that it was the defining one. But Douglass does not tell the story of just one woman; so close was Lady Caroline Lamb to the political and cultural heart of the Regency that, in exploring so intelligently the causes and effects of her exhausting life, he gives us a new portrait of the age." —Frances Wilson.

"Oh the low life of the high born! Paul Douglass's spirited account of Lady Caroline's love affairs, intrigues, ambitions, and accomplishments is compulsively readable. Lady Caroline emerges as one of the most endearing women in history, hot, generous, gifted, brave, wrong-headed and wise. I loved meeting her." —Molly Giles.

"Lady Caroline Lamb is best known as Byron's most clinging ex-lover, notorious for sending him clippings of her pubic hair and for her portrait of him in her scandalous first novel, Glenarvon. Without descending into psychobabble, Douglass, a professor of English and American literature at San Jose State University, reveals the stresses of his subject's childhood, including a mother who was almost always ill or in the midst of an affair. He gives a sympathetic though unsentimental account of Caroline's adult mania and addictions to drugs and alcohol. He evokes her stoically reserved husband, William Lamb, later prime minister of England, telling in intricate detail the chilling story of his family's numerous attempts to separate Caroline from him. To his credit, Douglass does not allow Byron to dominate the narrative. But he maintains that Byron's influence made Caroline write her novels, describing her literary ambition as a form of misguided psychological transference. Douglass faithfully catalogues the content of Caroline's three gothic novels, although some readers may find his attention to detail a little wearisome. Constructing his narrative largely from letters and diaries, Douglass provides a richly textured account of 19th-century aristocratic life, with all its sordid liaisons and backstabbing: a world in which the eccentrically emotive and indiscreet Caroline was all too vulnerable." —Publisher's Weekly. (October 2004).

"Paul Douglass's biography is the first to foreground the Romantic writer over the 'Byron woman' who descended into 'erotomania'. Douglass skilfully brings together the famous chapters in Lamb's life - marriage to the man who would become Queen Victoria's first Prime Minister, extra-marital affairs, Byron, mental health problems and the 'madness of writing' - and combines this with new, meticulously researched, evidence of her life outside these events and with a narrative rich in social, political and cultural context. . . . Douglass's erudition arguably makes this the first literary biography of Lamb and it has excellent chapters on her later novels, neglected poetry and the music of Glenarvon. Douglass also makes good use of unpublished texts not previously discussed as part of Lamb's literary corpus, such as her amusing and scholarly letters and the writerly experiments in the commonplace books in the John Murray archive. . . . By focusing on Lamb's own writing, rather than gossip about her, Douglass allows Lamb to speak for herself. One of the main themes of this work is the underlying exploration of why Lamb has been ignored by 1980s feminist revisionism and 1990s studies of Romanticism and gender.... The theory that Lamb was only motivated to write after her affair with Byron was damaging to her literary reputation as her works were viewed as hysterical obsession. The discussion of Lamb's early writing works to dispel this archaic judgement, and the effects of the Byron affaire upon her work are treated sensitively and sensibly. " —British Association for Romantic Studies Bulletin & Review (October 2005).

Douglass makes it very clear that Lady Caroline brought much to her relationship with Byron, that she captivated his mind, and that her hold on him lasted far beyond their affair. This biography helps to ensure that Lady Caroline Lamb will be remembered along with Byron as long as he is remembered. —Pacific Coast Philology (2007).