Opening the Open Secret: The Stowe-Byron Controversy

Abstract

In 1869, Macmillan's Magazine and the Atlantic Monthly published Har riet Beecher Stowe's The True Story of Lady Byron's Life, which was written as a rejoinder to the recently published memoirs of Countess Teresa Guiccioli, Lord Byron's mistress. Stowe argues that Guiccioli's Recollections (1869), as like other auto/biographical writings both about and by the poet, was predicated upon a construction of Lord Byron as a sensitive victim of his marriage and upon a construction of Lady Byron as a narrow-minded woman without the intellect or heart to understand her husband's life and works