Definition
Lady Caroline Lamb is a name that hovers on the fringes of Romanticism because of her adulterous but short-lived affair with Lord Byron in 1812, a representation of which drives forward the narrative of her first novel Glenarvon (1816). Published a month after Byron had left England in self-imposed exile, the novel was a scandalous success due to its being a roman-Ã -clef. The affair lasted only a few months but the emotional aftermath lasted years, and Glenarvon has generally been interpreted as a desperate act of revenge by a cast-off mistress and also one of self-publicizing and literary gossiping. There is no doubt as to the importance of Byron to Lamb: her subsequent novels, Graham Hamilton (1822) and Ada Reis (1823), also feature recognizable portraits of him. Yet Lamb is more than a minor part of the global phenomenon that was Byronism. For Lamb, the encounter with Byron was the catalyst for a reflective critique upon a culture of spectacle to which they both...
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References
Copeland, Edward. 2012. The Silver Fork Novel; Fashionable Fiction in the Age of Reform. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Grieg, Hannah. 2013. The Beau Monde, Fashionable Society in Georgian London. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lamb, Lady Caroline. 1816. Glenarvon. In Works of Lady Caroline Lamb, 3 volumes, ed. Leigh Wetherall Dickson and Paul Douglass. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009.
———. 1822. Graham Hamilton. In Works of Lady Caroline Lamb, 3 volumes, ed. Leigh Wetherall Dickson and Paul Douglass. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009.
———. 1823. Ada Reis. In Works of Lady Caroline Lamb, 3 volumes, ed. Leigh Wetherall Dickson and Paul Douglass. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009.
Further Reading
Douglass, Paul. 2004. Lady Caroline Lamb, A Biography. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2006. The Whole Disgraceful Truth; Selected Letters of Lady Caroline Lamb. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Foreman, Amanda. 1998. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. London: Harper Collins Publishers.
Kelly, Linda. 2013. A History of London’s Most Celebrated Salon: Holland house. London/New York: I.B. Tauris.
Lamb, Lady Caroline. Works of Lady Caroline Lamb, 3 Volumes, ed. Leigh Wetherall Dickson and Paul Douglass. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009.
Mitchell, Leslie. 2005. The Whig World 1760–1837. London/New York: Hambledon Continuum.
Morrison, Robert. 2019. The Regency Revolution: Jane Austen, Napoleon, Lord Byron and the Making of the Modern World. London: Atlantic Books.
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Dickson, L.W. (2021). Lamb, Lady Caroline. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Romantic-Era Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11945-4_139-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11945-4_139-2
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Ponsonby), Lady Caroline- Published:
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11945-4_139-3
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Lamb, Lady Caroline- Published:
- 26 November 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11945-4_139-1