302
PARTISAN REVIEW
a near-stranger she urged him to marry, and his sister, "your A" and
"my A." His commitment to write about his love life
to
Lady Mel–
bourne was a pledge
to
be a witty rake. Writing to her, he kept himself
that way, alienating his own affections. Her advice and his desire
to
maintain their correspondence saved him from both Caroline and
Augusta, he tells her.
In
a ga ll ant but surely not empty protest, he says
that the ·correspondence itself is his dearest object. The particular
"business" is that of Lady Frances Webster:
I am not sorry for this business-were it only on accoum of your
epislles- which I do think the most amusing-the most
developing-and tactiques
in the world-come what may-l can
hardly regret the unLOward events which led LO an imimacy produc–
tive LO me of much instruction-& not less
intellectual
pleasure-you
have preserved me from
two-one
evemuall y & the other had been
immediately fatal-l cannot repay the obligation but I may at least
acknowledge it-& as the world goes it is something notLO hate you
for having done me so much service.
Embroiled with demanding, oppressively physical females, Byron
made courtly love by letter to Lady Melbourne, over sixty and retired
from the field, so that his temperature might drop. Then, to amuse her
~nd
himself, he embroiled hims('l£ anew.
The connection between Byron's correspondence with his mother
surrogate and the crucial event of his life is startling: he thought of
marrying Annabella Milbanke partly because she was Lady Mel–
bourne's niece. Drawing room comedy assumes, as we read, a causal
relationship to tragedy. The letters tell, and also are, the whole story;
for Byron seems not
to
have seen Miss Milbanke for about two years
before she accepted him, by mail, in early September of 1814. Just a
year before that she had surprised him with an odd compulsive letter
"explaining" why she had turned down his proposal in 1812. The
second courtship thus initiated was carried on entirely by letter, so all
the facts are available
to
our curiosity, complicated as they are by the
conventions and limitations of correspondence. (The irony that gov–
erned Byron's life, slipping in and out of his own hands, extended to
the letter-it will appear in Volume IV-which Annabella read as a
proposal but which is perhaps simply a remarkable instance of a
brilliant letter-writer's faking himself ou t. ) Byron decided very early
that Annabella was a girl who had been "Clarissa Harlow'd" into
virtuousness by doting parents; the allusion
to
Richardson's novel is
suggestive. Writing to her, he played Lovelace, the rake, professing
