Lady Caroline Lamb

Lady Caroline Lamb , among Lord Byron's many lovers, stands out - vilified, portrayed as a self-destructive nymphomaniac - her true story has never been told. Now, Paul Douglass provides the first unbiased treatment of a woman whose passions and independence were incompatible with the age in which she lived. Taking into account a traumatic childhood, Douglass explores Lamb's so-called 'erotomania' and tendency towards drug abuse and madness - problems she and Byron had in common. In this portrait, she emerges as a person who sacrificed much for the welfare of a sick child, and became an artist in her own right. Douglass illuminates her novels and poetry, her literary friendships, and the lifelong support of her husband and her publisher, John Murray.

"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)

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

"...a sympathetic though unsentimental account...Douglass provides a richly textured account of 19th-century aristocratic life, with all its sordid liaisons and backstabbing." - Publishers Weekly

"A monumental work of scholarship that illuminates, in a score of fascinating and unexpected ways, that famous woman 'of wild originality.'" - Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman

"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, novelist. Her most recent books are The Wave in the Mind and Gifts

"As Paul Douglass shows, with sympathy, insight, and persuasive thoroughness,Lady Caroline Lamb - rather than her most famous lover Byron - was truly 'mad, bad and dangerous to know.' 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, Professor of English and Women's Studies, University of California, Los Angeles

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"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, Associate Professor, DePaul University, editor of Lady Melbourne's letters, and author of Byron: The Erotic Liberal

"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, Professor of English, University of Durham

"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, Clifford Cutchins Professor of English, Virginia Tech

"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, author of Literary Seductions: Compulsive Writers and Diverted Readers and The Courtesan's Revenge: Harriette Wilson, the Woman who Blackmailed the

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"Oh the low life of the high born! Paul Douglas'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, author of Iron Shoes

PAUL DOUGLASS is Professor of English and American Literature at San Jose State University, USA, where for six years he chaired the department. He is the author of Bergson, Eliot, and American Literature (1986), and the editor (with Frederick Burwick) of The Crisis in Modernism (1992) and A Selection of Hebrew Melodies, Ancient and Modern, by Isaac Nathan and Lord Byron, a facsimile edition (1988). His essays and reviews have appeared in Keats-Shelley Journal, European Romantic Review, The Byron Journal, and Newstead Abbey Byron Society Review.