L amb, L ady C aroline

Abstract

Lady Caroline Lamb (1785–1828) was a novelist and poet whose notorious 1812 liaison with Lord Byron has fascinated readers since before the publication of her notorious novel Glenarvon (1816), which was based upon their affair. Her literary reputation has been a victim of this fascination with her private life, and only in the latter part of the twentieth century has serious attention been paid to her novels, poetry, song lyrics, and satires of Byron's Don Juan . Lamb's fiction draws upon the traditions of the Gothic and sentimental novels to which she was exposed, like Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1748), Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768), Frances Burney's Evelina (1778), Charlotte Smith's Emmeline; or The Orphan of the Castle (1788), Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Sidney Owenson/Lady Morgan's The Wild Irish Girl (1806), Madame de Staël's Corinne (1807), and Maria Edgeworth's Tales of Fashionable Life (1809). She was also influenced by the realism of Chodorlos de Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) and the phantasmagorical and supernatural elements in Jacques Cazotte's Le Diable Amoreux (1772) and William Beckford's Vathek (1786). Lamb's work is foundational for the literature of Byronism, and it is also a precursor to the ‘silver fork novel’ that emerged in the mid‐1820s.