Edith's Reviews > Lady Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit

3 1/2 stars. Do people still read Lord Byron, or know of his eventful life, including his passionate relationship with the beautiful but volatile Lady Caroline Lamb? This short biography of Lady Caroline, most famously Byron's lover, but also the wife of William Lamb, future Prime Minister as Lord Melbourne, seeks to reevaluate her. It has much to recommend it, but it also presents some problems.

On the plus side, the book is physically beautiful, with numerous high quality color plates. And as always, Fraser has done her research, and presents it in a readable, almost conversational style. Her comfortable acquaintance with the complicated relationships of the Whig aristocracy of the late 18th and early 19th centuries is apparent, and she makes the reader comfortable as well. (But why not, as she would say--she is a Pakenham, and the descendant of "Silence," Sarah, Lady Jersey.) She is very good at the apt quote and clearly knows the literature of the period very well. And the aristocrats (and others) who people the book are fascinating; their relationships, both familial and amorous, are incredibly complex. And most of them had a gift for witty and cogent writing.

On the negative side, there are a few flaws of editing; there is some unnecessary repetition and at least one person appears without any explanation of who she is. But the most irritating thing is Fraser's repeated assertion that Caroline deserves to be thought of and respected as a "free spirit." While it is true that Caroline would very likely have been much happier in the 21st century, in which she might have received more useful support than the laudanum and alcohol she self-medicated with, and in which some of her behavior, castigated as disgracefully unfeminine in her time, would have seemed ordinary, much of the activity Fraser denominates as free-spirited seems more the result of deep unhappiness than of a constructive desire for liberty. Being criticized for riding astride rather than side-saddle is one thing, but stalking Lord Byron like a woman out of "Fatal Attraction" is another. Caroline was mentally unstable all her life, and while she was undeniably treated very badly, there is no doubt that she was frequently a very difficult person to have in your life.

Fraser often points out Caroline's generosity and kindness, but these are often directed at servants, strangers, and animals, and not at her husband, whom she not infrequently betrayed or treated unkindly. Her husband's tenderness and loyalty, in the face of extremely public unfaithfulness, and not just with Lord Byron, is one of the most interesting and curious currents of the book. While no one can really tell now what the exact nature of her mental and emotional unhappiness was, to a modern reader, it looks strikingly like bipolar disorder. Fraser rejects this diagnosis, saying yes, she sees the manic aspects of Caroline's life, but the melancholy aspect is absent. Then a few pages on she quotes one of Caroline's relative's reports that Caroline varied extremely between being giddily happy and tears.

Caroline was a deeply unhappy woman whose extremes of emotion and obsessional attachment to Byron, who no longer wanted her, deserve pity. At the same time, it is also possible to understand how deeply her behavior distressed her friends and family. That part of the distress derived from the extremely limited concept of what it was acceptable for a woman, especially an elite woman, to do, is even sadder. But it does not make Caroline a free spirit.

Caroline wrote her best epitaph herself: "I am like the wreck of a little boat, for I never came up to the sublime and beautiful--merely a little gay merry boat, which perhaps stranded itself at Vauxhall or London Bridge--or wounded without killing itself as a butterfly does in a tallow candle."