ANNE AMISON, author of Byron-Venice, brings to life some of her subject’s most personal and interesting moments during his travels from London to Italy.
February 1816. Wife and child gone. Bailiffs in the house. His precious library of books seized, to be sold on behalf of his debtors. Byron was – as might be expected – in extremely low spirits at this time. And so his friends began to rally round and offer help. His...
In March 1816, with his marriage in tatters and his possessions disappearing by the day as they were auctioned to pay his debts, Lord Byron received a letter from a young lady. Nothing unusual in that: ever since that morning in 1812 when he had woken to find himself...
...tried to prove her loving lord was mad, But as he had some lucid intermissions, She next decided he was only bad... Annabella Byron was not by any stretch of the imagination a sympathetic woman. She was the adored and pampered only child of elderly parents, and had...
As promised, here is the first in my series of blogs about 1816: the year in which Byron travelled to Venice. 1816 didn’t get off to a bright start for Byron, despite the birth of his daughter, Augusta Ada, who had arrived towards the end of the old year, on 10th...
1816 - exactly two hundred years ago this year - was a significant year for Lord Byron. His marriage, contracted just one short year earlier, on 2nd January 1815, crumbled into dust. His wife left him, taking his one month-old daughter with her: he would never see...
I have got a new friend, the finest in the world... Walking through Venice the other day, I saw this wonderful sight next to the place that sells presepio figures at San Giovanni Crisostomo. Being the sort of person I am, I immediately thought of Byron. Byron loved...
"Lady Byron is much obliged by your enquiries and both she and the little girl are going on as well as possible," Byron wrote in a letter dated December 1815. Two hundred years ago today, 10th December 1815, Byron’s daughter Ada was born. Barely five weeks later the...
I recently had the great pleasure of spending four days with a wonderful group of people who were here in Venice on a Readers’ Tour of our city and its literary associations, organised by my dear friend Anna Dreda, the proprietor of Wenlock Books. We visited...
