The Kindness of Sisters: Annabella Milbanke and the Destruction of the Byrons. David Crane

and naivety her niece proved no less easy to manage.

      After almost a year in which she had time to reflect on the loneliness of moral superiority and the dullness of domestic life without the frisson of Byron’s attentions, Annabella was ripe for persuasion. ‘I have received from Lady Melbourne an assurance of the satisfaction you feel in being remembered with interest by me,’ her first direct letter to him had begun on cue on 22 August 1813 – midway between the beginning of his affair with Augusta and his half-hearted pursuit of Lady Frances Webster,

      Let me fully explain this interest, with the hope that the consciousness of possessing a friend whom neither Time nor Absence can estrange may impart some soothing feeling to your retrospective views.⁸⁰

      One of the supreme temptations of the novel, E.M. Forster once confessed, is the desire to give characters the happiness that ‘real life’ denies them, and this first letter of Annabella’s can stir the same kind of emotions. She was so much in the habit of regarding herself in fictional terms that it would be hard not to follow suit anyway, but the cruelty of her fate now was to find herself less the heroine of her own shaping than the dupe of a Leclos plot over which she had no control. ‘You have remarked the serenity of my countenance,’ she went on,

      but mine is not the serenity of one who is a stranger to care, nor are the prospects of my future untroubled. It is my nature to feel long, deeply, and secretly, and the strongest affections of my heart are without hope. I disclose to you what I conceal even from those who have most claim to my confidence, because it will be the surest basis of that unreserved friendship which I wish to establish between us … Early in our acquaintance, when I was far from supposing myself preferred by you, I studied your character. I felt for you, and I often felt with you. You were, as I conceived, in a desolate position, surrounded by admirers who could not value you, and by friends to whom you were not dear. You were either flattered or persecuted. How often have I wished that the State of Society would have allowed me to offer you my sentiments without restraint.⁸¹

      With its oblique and frustrated demand to be heard this might anticipate the great climax of Persuasion, but Annabella was no more an Anne Elliot than Byron was Captain Wentworth. From her earliest youth she had dramatised herself as the self-sacrificing heroine of her historical daydreams, and the girl who had stood by Howard in her fantasies now abandoned herself to the role of Byron’s redeemer, uniting herself with him in an imaginary communion of souls that transcended time, place or vulgar self-interest. ‘Surely the Heaven-born genius without Heavenly grace must make a Christian clasp the blessing with greater reverence & love, mingled with a sorrow as a Christian that it is not shared’, she wrote to her old confidante Lady Gosford in her most ecstatic vein,

      Should it ever happen that he & I ever offer up a heartfelt worship together – I mean in a sacred spot – my worship will then be most worthy of the spirit to whom it ascends. It will glow with all the devout and grateful joy which mortal breast can contain. It is a thought too dear to be indulged – not dear for his sake, but for the sake of man, my brother man, whomever he be – & for any poor, unknown tenant of this earth I believe I should feel the same. It is not the poet – it is the immortal soul lost or saved.⁸²

      In one of her ‘Auto-descriptions,’ Annabella confessed this inability to distinguish fiction from fact, but what had been harmless enough in the child was profoundly dangerous in the adult. In the early days of their acquaintance she had self-consciously distanced herself from the ‘Byromania’ of London, but as she realised with something like panic how much she had lost in turning him down, she set about desperately trying to recreate Byron in an image she could square with her conscience, blindly moving with every exchange of letters towards marriage with a man she scarcely knew. ‘I entreat you then to observe the more consistent principles of unwearied benevolence’, she wrote to Byron in the language of a tabloid astrologer,

      No longer suffer yourself to be the slave of the moment, nor trust your noble impulses to the chances of Life. Have an object that will permanently occupy your feelings & exercise your reason. Do good. Your powers peculiarly qualify you for performing those duties with success, and may you experience the sacred pleasure of having them dwell in your heart!⁸³

      It is clear from Byron’s reply that Annabella’s tone had startled him, but if he had to sacrifice Augusta, it hardly seemed to matter whom he married. ‘To the part of your letter regarding myself’, he wrote back, having first assured her that she was the only person with whom he had ever contemplated marriage,

      I could say much – but I must be brief – if you hear ill of me it is probably not untrue though perhaps exaggerated – on any point in which you may honour me with an interest I shall be glad to satisfy you – to confess the truth or refute the calumny. – I must be candid with you on the score of Friendship – it is a feeling towards you with which I cannot trust myself – I doubt whether I could help loving you – ⁸⁴

      There was not a scrap of hypocrisy about Byron, but what was almost as hazardous as he renewed his interest in Lady Melbourne’s niece, was the artist’s ability to conjure imagined feeling out of the depths of genuine experience. He would have found it impossible to preserve his illusions about a future with Anna-bella had he seen anything of her, but in the safety of letters he could indulge in an emotional transfer that enabled him to create an idea of her and himself that could sustain him through the travesty of an epistolary courtship.

      If it was a serious error of judgement on Annabella’s part to imagine she could reform Byron, it was a more culpable misjudgement on his to think that he would ever allow it. It is unlikely that with Augusta so compulsively in his mind anyone could have filled her place, but as he edged inexorably towards a second proposal, it was Annabella’s fate to be almost diagrammatically the wrong person at the wrong time – a poor woman’s Dorothea Brooke, capable of change but not growth, of ardour but not compassion, sensibility but no real sympathy.

      It is possible still that Byron could have forgiven Annabella for what she was, and yet he must have known, as he finally steeled himself to propose, that he could never forgive her for not being Augusta. In the early days of their courtship her virtues had been thrown into relief by the extravagances of Caroline Lamb, but seen now through the distorting prism of his ‘perverse passion’⁸⁵ everything about her would inevitably come to seem different, her goodness primness, her certainties dogmatism, and her learning pedantry – the five foot three incarnation of all the cultural and moral littleness he despised.

      Byron’s courtship of Annabella through the late summer of 1814 seems so reckless, so wantonly obtuse in the refusal to recognise the warning signals, that no conventional explanation of his actions seems quite sufficient. In his journals and letters he might describe her as his last hope of salvation, and yet if at some superficial level he managed to convince himself of that, his choice betrays a deeper compulsion to make her the causa belli of a rift with the world she embodied that had been threatening since the first success of Childe Harold.

      It is this secret, unconscious, destructive agenda that gives such an air of inescapable misery to the story that unfolds with his second proposal to Annabella. On 9 September, having prevaricated as long as he could, he wrote to her from Newstead, sealing and despatching the letter ‘with the greatest haste’, according to Tom Moore, before he could have second thoughts⁸⁶. On the same day that she received it at Seaham, Annabella wrote back, a letter of touching and honest simplicity. ‘I have your second letter’, she told him,

      and am almost too agitated to write – but you will understand. It would be absurd to suppress anything – I am and have long been pledged to myself to make your happiness my first object in life. If I can make you happy, I have no other consideration. I will trust to you for all I should look up to – all I can