“The Very Worst Woman I Ever Heard of”: Rosina Bulwer Lytton and Biography as Vindication

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe novelist Rosina Bulwer Lytton wrote the historical novel Bianca Cappello (1843) about a notorious Renaissance noblewoman, who is also the subject of a biographical entry by Mary Hays in her Female Biography. Both writers risked reinforcing their reputation for rebelliousness through their interest in a scandalous predecessor. For refusing to conform to her marital role, Rosina was wrongly incarcerated in a lunatic asylum by her husband, the novelist and politician Edward Bulwer Lytton. After her death in 1882, her loyal friend and executrix Louisa Devey published a biography to vindicate her controversial life. This patchwork of various kinds of writing contains original documents taken mainly from Rosina's autobiographies, letters, legal documents and other third-party accounts. The hybrid form of her Life of Rosina, Lady Lytton (1887) provided a means of navigating sensitive and potentially inflammatory material. This article points to the protean nature of biography through which it can blend with autobiography and how the inclusion of so much of Rosina’s life-writing in Devey’s book blurs the distinction between author and editor. Devey’s role as a biographer makes clear that her agenda was not one of objectivity, but vindication.