Word: elwin
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Dates: during 1963-1963
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LORD BYRON'S WIFE (556 pp.)-Malcolm Elwin-Harcourt, Brace & World...
...bitch she may have been, but British Literary Historian Malcolm Elwin doubts that she was what went wrong with the marriage. In this first study of the subject based on "unrestricted use of the Lovelace Papers," the famous collection of family letters and documents, Elwin concludes that the real villain was more probably Annabella herself. A quiet, humorless, literal-minded girl, she took all of Byron's Gothic romancing with impenetrable solemnity. For a man like Byron, thinks Elwin, the temptation to pile extravagance on extravagance must have been almost irresistible once he found an audience that responded...
Greatest Villain. For the most part, Elwin lets the letters speak for themselves; they provide fascinating glimpses into a marriage in which the very emotional vocabularies of the partners were almost totally different. When Annabella first met Byron in 1812, he had just published Childe Harold and was the hero of London society. Annabella reported to her mother that she found him "a very bad, very good man ... He is sincerely repentant for the evil he has done, though he has no resolution (without aid) to adopt a new course of conduct and feeling." It took her no time...