The Secret: The Strange Marriage of Annabella Milbanke and Lord Byron - Hardcover

Hay, Ashley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1854107836 ISBN 13: 9781854107831

Publisher: Aurum Press, 2001

Synopsis

A compelling addition to the hugely popular subject of Lord Byron A new young historical writer to set alongside Amanda Foreman and Bella Bathurst The extravagant and improbable life of Lord Byron - "mad, bad and dangerous to know" - has always found a large market in biography and literary history. Now, Ashley Hay, a young and superbly talented writer, has written a compellingly readable account of one of the strangest and most mysterious episodes in his life. In January 1815, Lord Byron married Annabella Milbanke. He was London's most famous poet and its most desirably notorious lover, and everyone wanted to be his wife. She was a young lady with handsome prospects and good connections, but painfully shy and retiring. They had met only a couple of times before she had turned down his first proposal: after the unlikely correspondence that then ensued between them she accepted his second, but they saw each other only once more before their wedding day. After only a year of marriage, and just a month after the birth of their first child. Annabella left Byron and went home to her parents, never to see him again. The misdemeanours in her husband's conduct she subsequently hinted at scandalised London - and the lurid speculation as to the sensational secret she never quite revealed has continued ever since. Painstakingly pieced together from their diaries and letters. The Secret is a sensitive and poignant portrait of the celebrity couple of their day, whose strange marriage became a cause celebre of Regency England, and its account of a vulnerable, wronged woman abandoned to her horrifying secret has the compulsiveness of the best fiction. The length of a compact novel, it will appeal to everyone who has enjoyed a recent bestseller like Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.

About this title

About the Author:

Ashley Hay is a freelance journalist who lives in Sydney, Australia. The Secret is her first book.

About this edition

• Publisher: Aurum Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1854107836
• ISBN 13: 9781854107831
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 280