Byron
Augusta's half-brother, George Gordon, Lord Byron, didn't meet her until he went to Harrow School and even then only very rarely. From 1804 onwards, however, she wrote to him regularly and became his confidante especially in his quarrels with his mother. Their correspondence ceased for two years after Byron had gone abroad, and was not resumed until she sent him a letter expressing her sympathy on the death of his mother, Catherine.
Not having been brought up together they were almost like strangers to each other. But they got on well together and appear to have fallen in love with each other. When Byron's marriage collapsed and he sailed away from England never to return, rumours of incest, a very serious and scandalous offence, were rife. Some say it was because of his fear of prosecution that Byron abandoned his country.
There is some evidence to support the incest accusation. The Honourable Augusta Leigh's third daughter, born in the Spring of 1814, was christened Elizabeth Medora Leigh. A few days after the birth, Byron went to his sister's house Swynford Paddocks, Six Mile Bottom, Cambridgeshire, to see the child, and wrote, in a letter to Lady Melbourne, his confidante: "Oh, but it is not an ape, and it is worth while" (a child of an incestuous relationship was thought likely to be deformed).
Read more about this topic: Augusta Leigh
Famous quotes containing the word byron:
“I should like to know who has been carried off, except poor dear me—I have been more ravished myself than anybody since the Trojan war.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“To fly from, need not be to hate, mankind:
All are not fit with them to stir and toil,
Nor is it discontent to keep the mind
Deep in its fountain, lest it overboil.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“My beautiful, my own
My only Venice—this is breath! Thy breeze
Thine Adrian sea-breeze, how it fans my face!
Thy very winds feel native to my veins,
And cool them into calmness!”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)