Lady Byron and Her Daughters is a fantastic feminist biography of Byron’s wife, Annabella (Anne Isabella Milbanke). Annabella is usually remembered as the estranged wife of Lord Byron and the controlling mother of Ada Lovelace. This biography paints a more well-rounded picture of a woman who has often been portrayed as prudish and controlling, and points out her many contributions to education and philanthropy.

Annabella encountered Byron during the midst of “Byromania” (her phrase). He had published Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and was both scandalous and sought after – inviting him to a party was like inviting a rock star. Byron, or, as I like to call him, “That Pretentious Hypocrite,” liked to lean on walls during these parties and sorrowfully announce that he had no true friends. This, of course, was irresistible to Annabella, who never in her life found a cause she couldn’t get excited about (except suffrage). Annabella promised to be Byron’s true friend and speak to him candidly and fix his flaws, and he thought that was fantastic. He called her “The Princess of Parallelograms” because of her brilliance with math and her logical approach to life (later he would use this mockingly). She told him that she was engaged to someone else (she wasn’t) so that their relationship would stay completely friendly. What could go wrong?

After many platonic letters and two marriage proposals she agreed to marry him despite the fact that while she really wasn’t a prig (he was rather horrified to discover that she liked sex after all) she had fairly strict morals and Byron was dedicated to having sex with anyone that moved.

The brief and horrible marriage between Annabella and Byron was an abject lesson in why it’s a terrible idea to marry someone with the goal of fixing them or being fixed by them. After enduring infidelity, emotional abuse, and Byron’s threats to kill her and/or himself, Annabella fled with their baby daughter Ada and managed to get a legal separation from Byron after one year of marriage. In the rest of her life, she established experimental schools, supported various political causes including abolition, and helped countless young women who found themselves in difficult circumstances. She also used much of her wealth to help slaves escape from the United States to the United Kingdom.

Author Julia Markus is firmly Team Annabella, and she tends to downplay the battles between Annabella and her famous daughter, Ada. She is also a firm believer in the theory that Byron was having sex with his half-sister, Augusta, at the time he married Annabella – in fact he proposed to Annabella to deflect attention from his incestuous affair. The relationship between Annabella and Augusta is one of the most interesting aspects of the book. Annabella supported all of Augusta’s children to at least some degree, especially Medora, the child who is thought to be another of Byron’s daughters.

The biography is about Annabella, so the focus stays on her, but this can be frustrating because so many fascinating people pass in and out of the book as they pass in and out of Annabella’s life. The book also tends to be so firmly in the pro-Annabella camp that she comes off as annoyingly saintly. While the biographer states that she has flaws, she rarely shows those flaws in action. Annabella’s biggest flaw seems to have been that she was unable to articulate what she wanted for herself and always thought of others first. That could be incredibly passive-aggressive but it’s never actually portrayed that way. Instead, it comes off like the kind of flaw you might invent for a job interviewer (“What’s my biggest flaw? It’s that I care about my job TOO much”).

Readers should be advised that the Romantics were fairly miserable people and as such the book contains allegations of pedophilia, rape, incest, domestic violence, eating disorders, and mental illness, so it’s not a happy read, although Annabella comes off as pretty triumphant. Ada’s death of cancer in particular is incredibly horrible to read. Interestingly, the biographer doesn’t even give Annabella’s cause of death (breast cancer), and alludes only briefly to her experiencing pain during death. Annabella is described as having a very Victorian death consisting of a long, slow, increasingly saintly wasting away.

Annabella was not financially dependent on anybody and this gave her a remarkable freedom of physical and intellectual movement through society. Accordingly, the book touches on a variety of political and social movements that Annabella affected and was affected by. Above all, this book does a great deal to rectify the erasure of a remarkable woman who believed it was her fate to be “loved by strangers” but not by people she actually knew.

Despite its flaws, this is a great, though not cheerful biography of an often-overlooked person and her contributions to the world. It’s highly readable and well researched, with a ton of rather torrid drama – I read it in three dizzy days during which, if you’ll pardon the cliché, I could not put it down. The book gives a great picture of the seamier side of Regency life and the cracks in polite early Victorian society. The book gives great insights into Annabella but also into Augusta, Byron, and Ada. It left me feeling a much richer understanding of the Romantic movement and the casualties the movement left in its wake, and it left me with a greater understanding of what life might be like for a woman of high social standing and independent means.