Lady Caroline Lamb Beyond Byron: Graham Hamilton, Female Authorship, and the Politics of Public Reputation

Abstract

This article troubles the terms by which scholars have typically understood Lady Caroline Lamb's authorial career. I pay particular attention to the publicity that Lady Caroline received throughout her lifetime, her unpublished correspondence, and her second novel Graham Hamilton (1822). Graham Hamilton and the extensive archival record surrounding it challenge longstanding assumptions about Lady Caroline as little more than Byron's jilted lover turned scandalous author. I relocate Lady Caroline's authorial career and Graham Hamilton in particular alongside now-canonical work by Frances Burney as well as Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen, and in doing so I argue Lady Caroline's important place alongside them. Ultimately this article suggests that Lady Caroline's engagement with the politics of authorship and public identity demonstrate that her contributions to Romanticism extend beyond her well-known affair with Byron.