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Revolution and Romanticism
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A facsimile reprint in the Revolution & Romanticism series chosen and introduced by Jonathan Wordsworth ISBN 1 85477 132 9 245 X 175 mm 1016 as 264 pages |
CAROLINE LAMB Glenarvon 1816 Glenarvon is the sensational book that fuelled the Byron scandal in the year of his separation from Annabella Milbanke. It is both a society novel, its characters identified by its society readers, and a Gothic romance, written in a larger-than-life idiom: Byron complained that he had been ‘mixed up with fiction and poetical matter’. It is also a novel about passion. Calantha (pointedly named after the heroine of Ford’s play The Broken Heart) becomes infatuated by Glenarvon, is enslaved by him, and dies: much of the narrative focusses on her emotions and the stages of her destruction. Apart from a short section set in London the background is Ireland and the insurrections of 1798, Calantha being torn between Glenarvon’s leadership of the rebellion and her family’s determination to suppress it. £45 $80 Lady Caroline - our affections are not in our power - mine are engaged. I love another - were I inclined to reproach you I might for a thousand things, but I will not. They really are not cause of my present conduct - my opinion of you is entirely alter’d, & if I had wanted anything to confirm me, your Levities, your caprices and the mean subterfuges you have lately made use of... would entirely have open’d my eyes. I am no longer yr lover - I shall never be less than your friend - it would be too dishonourable for me to name her to whom I am now entirely devoted and attached. |
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