Mutual Attachment Research Articles

Lord Byron and Count Alborghetti

When Byron entered Ravenna for the first time on June 10, 1819, roiling up to the Porta Sisi in his heavy Napoleonic carriage, he was weary from the long journey across the flat Romagna plain and distraught by conflicting emotions concerning his liaison with the young Countess Teresa Guiccioli.1 Only a short while out of a convent and married to a man three times her age, she was highly impressionable and her emotions had been quickly engaged by the handsome and diffident English poet whom she had met at a conversazione in Venice in April. Indeed Byron and the Countess had arranged their affair so well that not only was the sixty-year-old husband cuckolded, but, much more surprising to Byron, he and Teresa had formed a sincere mutual attachment. Now that Count Guiccioli, reputed to be the wealthiest man in the Romagna, had carried his wife back to his palace in Ravenna, Byron, reflecting on this new love that had come so suddenly, found it a little disconcerting. Having had his emotions involved so often where his mind could not give full assent, he could not at first adjust himself to the idea—though he felt it deeply enough—that this affair was different. So that when Teresa wrote that she was ill and urgently requested him to come, he hesitated and delayed, not so much from fear of a stiletto in his back (though he dramatized that possibility in his letters to his friends—-and it was a real one so far as he knew) as from reluctance to subside into a regular cavalier servente. Writing to Hob-house on May 17, 1819, he said:

Psychoses occurring in a father and his two daughters

Elmira was subjected to the dominance of her grandmother who allowed her very little liberty and restricted her social life. A very strong mutual attachment developed between Elmira and her father. The mental illness of her sister, Dorothy, apparently precipitated Elmira's mental upset. She had a residence in Kings Park State Hospital, admitted there her attachment for her father and dramatized her conflict regarding it by means of his photograph which she carried with her and shich she could not decide whether to keep or to destroy. She recovered from her upset, was discharged and then married very suddenly, because as she stated herself her home life was unsatisfactory. Apparently marriage to her, as to her sister, Dorothy, was the means of escape. The presence of typical manic symptoms, elation, flight of ideas, distractibility, overactivity with recovery and the history of a previous attack with recovery of a manic episode indicate the diagnosis of manic-depressive psychosis; manic type. Nevertheless some schizophrenic features were present in addition as evidenced in the ideation. The prognosis seems more uncertain than in the case of Dorothy.