In January 1870, an undaunted Mrs Stowe returned to the fray. Lady Byron Vindicated disclosed by its title alone that this book was to be no mere hagiography. John Stuart Mill had pointed the way forward. His The Subjection of Women, published in 1869, was admired by Stowe for its emphasis upon the slavery of women, a topic which fitted well with the subject upon which she had justly established her reputation. But the use of the word ‘vindicated’ in her title connected Stowe’s new book more directly to Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminist polemic of 1792 (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman). Eight decades later, women’s rights were back on the agenda in America. Lady Byron Vindicated was written with that large audience of disenfranchised voters well to the fore in the mind of Mrs Stowe.
Paget’s article for Blackwood’s had followed Madame de Boissy’s lead in criticising Lady Byron for a silence (about the reason for leaving her husband) which, when writing her earlier article, Mrs Stowe had been at pains to defend. It was, she had stated with admiration in ‘True Story’, a ‘perfect silence’. Lady Byron Vindicated marked a change of stance. Ill-treated by a brutal husband, Lady Byron had not said enough. She had neglected a public duty by failing to broadcast the ghastly details (the incest) of a disgraceful tale. Wealthy, philanthropic, strong-willed and formidably intelligent, who could have been better placed than Lady Byron to light the way forward, to offer enslaved wives a more lofty position from which to seek equality and escape humiliation?
Warming to her theme, Mrs Stowe berated one old-fashioned Blackwood’s reviewer who had praised a certain widow (not Lady Byron) for concealing the brutal way in which her husband had treated her. Reverting to her finest declamatory style, Mrs Stowe set up a caricature of what she conceived such men as this widow’s admirer to want:
helpless, cowering, broken-hearted, abject women given over to the animal love which they share alike with the dog – the dog, who, beaten, kicked, starved, and cuffed, still lies by his drunken master with great anxious eyes of love and sorrow . . .
While such passages as this made for sumptuous reading at the breakfast table, they bore no relation – as even Lady Byron’s worst enemies conceded – to the behaviour of Byron’s wife. (Nobody had ever accused Lady Byron of acting like a whipped dog.) But it was not Mrs Stowe’s impassioned defence of the right of abused wives to speak out that caused the real, persisting disquiet. It was the fact that a respected author, first in an article and then in the book that followed it, had set down in flaunting, naked print the fact of an incestuous relationship which she believed to have continued, with his wife’s knowledge, throughout the entire period of Lord Byron’s marriage.
Lady Byron Vindicated fanned the flames, but it was ‘The True Story’ that had ignited the fire in which Annabella’s hard-won reputation as a good-hearted and progressive social reformer was to be incinerated. The Tablet, slyly remarking that Mrs Stowe’s article was a godsend to the British press in a September that was short of news, noted that, in Newcastle alone, three versions of ‘The True Story’ had been published by the end of the month. Tickets for Mr Charles Larkin’s Newcastle lecture upon ‘The Byron Scandal’ were said to be selling out fast. William Howitt had meanwhile rushed his own unkind recollections of a generous patron into print on 4 September, in the Daily News. Three days later, the Pall Mall Gazette published a dignified letter in which Ralph truthfully stated that his grandmother’s written account of the marriage and separation (in a letter which she had despatched to Mrs Stowe at her request, and which Harriet had duly returned) contained no mention of incest. On 11 September, The Athenaeum, rising to the defence of the ‘retired, gentle, pure and modest life’ of Augusta Leigh, slyly enquired whether Mrs Stowe had sullied her soul by taking payment for her hideous diatribe. (She had, and of course they knew it.) Elsewhere, the Edinburgh Review found it impossible to review even such a harmless work as the late Henry Crabb Robinson’s diaries in October 1869 without alluding to the scandalous talk about Lady Byron.
Privately, Ralph said of the onslaught by the press upon his late grandmother’s reputation that both he and his sister felt as though they had been driven out into a storm, stark naked. Publicly, ordered by their father to hold their tongues, the siblings maintained an unhappy silence. It can’t have been easy. In October 1869, and again in January 1870, helpfully supplied with papers by the Leigh family, by John Murray, by Hobhouse’s daughter, Lady Dorchester* – and even by Lord Lovelace himself – the lawyer Abraham Hayward started a new and long-running hare in the Quarterly Review. Lord Byron, so Hayward now declared, would never have slept with Mrs Leigh, she having been a mother figure, ‘being so much older’, and ‘not at all an attractive person’. William Lovelace, meanwhile, was advised by a helpful relative on 8 November 1869 that busy Mrs Stowe had sent over to London a batch of various proofs. One, edited by a certain Charles Mackay, appeared to contain a memoir by the late Medora Leigh. With luck, Mackay’s book would prove too bad to appear in print. Still, perhaps Lord Lovelace might wish to intervene? Lovelace, writing back to his informant (Lord Chichester was Augusta Leigh’s nephew), explained that his hands were tied both by a personal horror of publicity and by the unfortunate fact that Lady Byron and he had not even been on speaking terms when she died. Publicly, at least, Lord Lovelace declined to intervene.
Nothing by now was too bad to be served up to a gossip-hungry
