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 would rather ... have a nod from an American, than a snuff- box from an emperor.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“The conqueror at least; who, ere Time renders
His last award, will have the long grass grow
Above his burnt-out brain and sapless cinders.
If I might augur, I should rate but low
Their chances: they are too numerous, like the thirty
Mock tyrants, when Rome’s annals wax’d but dirty.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“And, after all, what is a lie? ‘Tis but
The truth in masquerade.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)