Lamb (née Ponsonby), Lady Caroline

Lady Caroline Lamb is a name that hovers on the fringes of Romanticism because of her adulterous but short-lived affair with Lord Byron in 1812, a representation of which drives forward the narrative of her first novel Glenarvon (1816). Published a month after Byron had left England in self-imposed exile, the novel was a scandalous success due to its being a roman-à-clef. The affair lasted only a few months, but the emotional aftermath lasted years, and Glenarvon has generally been interpreted as a desperate act of revenge by a cast-off mistress and also one of self-publicizing and literary gossiping. There is no doubt as to the importance of Byron to Lamb: her subsequent novels, Graham Hamilton (1822) and Ada Reis (1823), also feature recognizable portraits of him. Yet, Lamb is more than a minor part of the global phenomenon that was Byronism. For Lamb, the encounter with Byron was the catalyst for a reflective critique upon a culture of spectacle to which they both contribute.