Miranda Seymour Envisions Lord Byron's Parental Woes

Literary Hub posts an excerpt from Miranda Seymour's new book, In Byron’s Wake: The Turbulent Lives of Lord Byron’s Wife and Daughter (Pegasus, 2018) which outlines a few of the complications that could arise when Lord Byron's your father. In this section, Seymour writes, "Lord Byron was exceptionally angry to discover, early in 1817, that Annabella, advised by his own former legal counsel, Sir Samuel Romilly, had made their daughter a Ward of Chancery." Picking up from there: 

(Formally, Ada remained in Chancery until 1825, a year after her father’s death.) Nevertheless, he never doubted that his estranged wife would make an excellent and conscientious parent to little Ada. “A girl is in all cases better with the mother,” Byron informed Augusta Leigh (by then the mother of seven) on 21 December 1820, “unless there is some moral objection.”

Claire Clairmont, having courageously decided to bring up Clara Allegra, her illegitimate child by Byron, as part of Percy Shelley’s bohemian household, was granted less respect. Byron liked Shelley and admired the poet’s wife, Mary, but the couple’s proclaimed aversion to monogamy presented the “moral objection” of which he disapproved (in anyone other than himself). While Annabella was threatened with a lawsuit if she dared to expose young Ada to the dangers of continental travel, the Shelleys, in 1818, were commanded to arrange for little Allegra’s transportation from England to Italy, where Claire was tearfully compelled to surrender her maternal rights. Byron’s caution about continental travel was well-founded. The Shelleys’ own baby daughter (another Clara) died of dysentery at Venice in September 1818. Their son William died of malaria in Rome the following summer. Clara Allegra—a child whose extraordinary resemblance to (of all people) Annabella was immediately noticed both by Byron and his valet, Fletcher—died of malaria or typhus in an Italian convent in 1822. She was five years old.

Byron, from afar, expressed an erratic but fatherly interest in his legitimate child. His parting gift to Ada had been one of his talismanic rings. Further small gifts were despatched while off upon his alpine travels in the summer of 1816, followed in due course by a locket, inscribed, in Italian: “Blood is thicker than water.” He asked for his daughter to be taught music (in which neither parent had any skill) and Italian (a language for which Annabella shared her husband’s deep love).

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