Beware: The Chibis Have Taken Control!

Via selenak <3 This book is a novelistic look primarily at the women (specifically the wives and lovers) associated with the most famous Romantic poets (Byron, Shelley, Keats). It is well-written and compelling, extremely relevant to my interests, and also part #12345 or so of an ongoing series of "Reasons why I, especially as a woman, am glad I did not live hundreds of years ago" (which... I guess... is probably a good thing for me to keep in mind, these days...) and, as sort of a corollary to that, an implicit stirring polemic in favor of no-fault divorce and antibiotics. (Neither of which existed at the time, of course, but gosh, no-fault divorce and antibiotics would have made SO many people's lives so much better in this book!) Also against bloodletting :PP

Our best-beloved high school Brit Lit teacher, Dr. M, told us all kinds of stories about these people. He was, I think, a proponent of the "teach the kids literature and literary history through sensationalistic gossip" mode that I found in salon many years later -- and it works! Even decades after Dr. M's class, I came in knowing enough that the names and many of the love-affairs (especially the most sensationalistic ones) were familiar, though of course I didn't know very many details. Even (especially?) Byron; though we never read any Byron in class, he was certainly a very sensational figure. (I think Dr. M's plan was that we would go off and read Byron on our own -- the same way that he announced, when we did the Canterbury Tales, that he was forbidden to teach us "The Miller's Tale" because of it being too R-rated, and we all promptly hared off and read it outside of class -- although I found Byron enough not to my taste that I never read very much of him even with that.)

What I was struck by most about this book was just how trapped the women are by... everything, by societal expectations, societal disapproval, family situations, the constant spectre of sickness and death; all the women were more-or-less (sometimes less) sympathetic but were placed in situations where they were either miserable or making other people miserable or both. (I can't quite say that about the men -- there were a couple of men that were not very sympathetic -- but at the same time you could see them all being trapped too.) But I didn't get the impression that the author was trying to make a point about that in particular, or at least not any more than any other point; I think this was just how it was.

A few notes about some of the women POV characters:

Augusta Byron (Leigh) - I knew enough to draw in a breath when her half-brother George was mentioned, even before the reveal of her last name :P Anyway, she is awesome, my favorite -- a truly nice character but never boring, and you can see why she and Byron got along so well; their bantering conversations in the book are really some of my favorite bits. Definitely one of the characters where I was Put Out that her life was as miserable as it was :P Lord Byron himself was charming and dark and you could both see why everyone fell in love with him and also that it must have been awful to have been his wife or lover (though in Augusta's case, mostly because of the societal issues).

Mary (Godwin/Wollstonecraft) Shelley - Intellectual and intense, the Mary POV sections were perhaps the most compelling for me, and also could be frustrating, in the way that when you empathize with a character, you don't want the character to do the stupid things that you know you would do (or maybe actually did as a young person) in her place :P I felt like she had a lot of extremely understandable strong feelings! And often you could see how the strong feelings were acting against her best interests! Percy Bysshe Shelley, on the other hand, was... well... there's an xkcd about guys like him :P I also really enjoyed her scenes with Byron, of all people -- very platonic, no attraction, and that's actually very refreshing, to me as well as to the characters.

Caroline Lamb - these were my least favorite sections. I remembered from Dr. M that she had some struggles with mental illness, and Morgan makes her manic behavior quite as sympathetic as possible -- but it still wasn't all that fun to read for me. William Lamb was less of a presence in the book but seemed, well, passive and patriarchical but mostly pretty reasonable, especially in comparison to Byron and Shelley. Not that this is saying a whole lot!

Annabella Millbank (Byron) - Byron's long-suffering wife. Annabella is clearly -- in fact textually -- even less of a reliable narrator than the others. I found the style of her sections really interesting -- they're distant and mannered and very distinct from the other characters' POV, and really point up how she fabricates her own story that may or may not (often does not) match up to reality, but certainly matches up to her own interests. And at the same time Byron was just terrible to her! But one can see how she is almost optimally ill-suited to him! selenak told me about how she was absolutely horrible to their daughter, Ada Lovelace, and that is certainly consistent with the way her character is delineated here.

Fanny Brawne - I think part of why Fanny was here was just as a contrast to the other characters. (Keats doesn't interact particularly strongly with Byron and Shelley.) She seems to be the only one, out of all of them, whose issues don't arise out of an intensely conflicted adolescence, whether it was because of her circumstances (Mary -- I haven't mentioned her father, William Godwin, but he was a piece of work in the novel, one of those guys who can totally twist everything to "rationally" argue how it benefits him; the type is familiar) or because of her personality (Caroline). She is the only one where it seems like she actually maybe had fun. (Well, Augusta may have had fun in her childhood -- but the way the chapters are laid out, the awful parts of her life get a lot more documentation.) Of course one knows it all has to go wrong, because Keats and Brawne, but after reading about everyone else it's almost a relief to just be dealing with death instead of death plus a whole ton of dysfunction. (Of course, there are hints that if he had lived, perhaps this love story too would also have devolved into dysfunction. But maybe it wouldn't have. For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!)

But, in conclusion: no-fault divorce for Harriet Shelley and Annabella Byron, please and thank you, and hey, I'll take it for Mary Shelley too, and alllllll the antibiotics and NO bloodletting for not just Keats and Byron but also all the babies and small children who died in this book >:(

Also, I did a little reading about the next generation and they all seem rather interesting too; I want the sequel :PP