LORD BYRON AND HIS BRIDE HAD barely left the church when their marriage began to disintegrate. The poet had wooed Anne Isabella (“Annabella”) Milbanke, a niece of Viscountess Melbourne, over a number of years, charmed by her intelligence, “high blood” and moderate prettiness (she was not, he wrote, “so glaringly beautiful as to attract many rivals”).
The young heiress, enchanted by her suitor’s energetic conversation, had agreed to marry Byron after rejecting his initial proposal. The new Lady Byron soon realised how justified her original misgivings had been.
In the words of the poet’s newest biographer, Andrew Stauffer, a professor of English at the University of Virginia and president of the Byron Society of America,
