In Byron's Wake - Hardcover

Miranda Seymour, author of the award-winning In My Father's House has written many acclaimed novels and biographies, including lives of Mary Shelley, Robert Graves, Ottoline Morrell and Helle Nice, the Bugatti Queen.

`Deft and compelling... The late Georgians invented the cult of celebrity and Byron was its first and finest creation. His wife and daughter could not escape fame, they could hope only to avoid notoriety. Annabella's attempts to preserve her reputation and other people's attempts to salvage Byron's have left a pall of smoke from burning letters and diaries, further obscuring the facts that remain. Seymour carries off a delicate balancing act, combining the historian's proper caution with acute judgements and a dashing narrative pace.' -- Rosemary Hill * London Review of Books * `A nuanced account, attuned to contemporary preoccupations...Goethe thought the spectacle of the Byrons' marriage "so poetical that if Lord Byron had invented it, he would hardly have had a more fortunate subject for his genius." Seymour's account...shows that it has lost none of its power to enthrall.' * Daily Telegraph * `A seasoned biographer, [Miranda Seymour] brings her considerable powers to the lives of the human jetsam...left to sink or swim in Byron's wake.' * Weekend Australian * `The story of this unhappy trio has been told before, but seldom with as much brio as it is here. Miranda Seymour's particular aim is to rescue Annabella from over a century's worth of bad press... Only now, in Seymour's careful hands, is she finally allowed to emerge as a figure who was neither saint nor sinner but somewhere in between.' -- Kathryn Hughes * The Guardian * 'On BBC4 she was celebrated as "Calculating Ada, the Countess of Computing"...writing about Babbage's Analytical Engine, whose potential she was the only one to realise...in her extraordinarily prophetic "Notes"...As for Ada's mother... Annabella Milbanke was married only a year before she left Byron, and he left the country...Miranda Seymour puts everything straight in this magnificent, highly readable double biography, which brings these two driven, complicated women vividly to life...In Seymour's hands, Annabella's pioneering work...at last assumes the status it deserves. Her humanity shines through...Ada's own short life was colourful, chaotic and bedevilled by illness...This is a very fine book. Written with warmth, panache and conviction, its formidable research is lightly worn.' -- Sue Gaisford * The Financial Times * 'There are difficult men, and then there is Lord Byron...the aim of Miranda Seymour's new book is to put Byron's wife, Annabella Milbanke, and their increasingly famous daughter, Ada Lovelace, centre stage... Not only were his wife and child still dealing with the rumours of cruelty, incest and sodomy - a then illegal activity which, Seymour...a wonderful writer... speculates, his young wife may have enjoyed - long after his death in 1824; they remained, in emotionally complex ways, in his thrall all their lives.' -- Rachel Cooke * The Observer, Book of the Day * 'It's more than 160 years since the death of the computer pioneer Ada Lovelace...credited with everything from the invention of the CD to the foundation of Silicon Valley. Miranda Seymour agrees that it is not Ada Lovelace's skills as a mathematician that matter, but rather her visionary words, 100 years before the birth of electronic computers, about "a new, a vast and a powerful language". In her ambitious...dual biography of Ada and her mother Lady Byron, the power of Lovelace's imagination and her belief in a "poetry of mathematics" is seen as a direct inheritance from Ada's father Lord Byron.' -- Mark Bostridge * The Spectator * 'Miranda Seymour is...subtle, astute and experienced an historian...and her zestful prose keeps the reader engaged throughout...in this deeply absorbing and meticulously researched biography of Byron's wife and daughter.' -- Rupert Christiansen * The Oldie * 'As Miranda Seymour writes in this gripping saga of a double-biography...the pretty 20-year-old Annabella Milbanke... [who] fell head over heels in love with mad, bad and dangerous Lord Byron...a serial womaniser who referred to sexual encounters as "hot luncheons"..."her heart was obstinately set upon the reformation of a rake".' -- Ysenda Maxtone Graham * Daily Mail, Book of the Week * `Vastly enjoyable...it is one of the many pleasures of this book that Seymour makes the reader warm to their inconsistencies, to all the inexplicable oppositions of character and action that make them so familiar and human...Brilliant, ebullient, eccentric, vivacious, egocentric and oddly dressed, Ada had her mother's discipline and her father's volatility.' -- Lucy Lethbridge * Literary Review * `It was...her brilliance as a scientific and mathematical pioneer that defined Ada...Struggling against her mother's domineering influence and the sexism of 19th Century England...she also found herself in competition for Annabella's attention with Medora, Augusta's daughter and rumoured Byronic bastard.' -- Alexander Larman * The Times * `A masterful portrait...Miranda Seymour is a marvellous storyteller...it is composed to a considerable extent of scandal, gossip and bad blood, Seymour's book is hugely entertaining as well as formidably researched, and should not be missed' -- John Carey * The Sunday Times *