Later Life
During her first month at Kirkby Mallory, Lady Byron wrote to Byron affectionately, addressing him as "dearest Duck". Her mother wrote to him and invited him to come to their home. However, her concern for Lady Byron soon became paramount, and her parents sought legal counsel. Their attorney recommended a legal separation and sent a letter proposing the separation to Byron. Augusta, who had remained with Byron at Piccadilly Terrace since his wife's departure, intercepted the letter, as she feared Byron would commit suicide if he knew of it. She returned the letter to Kirkby Mallory and communicated her opinion that greater consideration should be taken in the matter of the Byrons' marriage. A week later, however, a messenger sent Byron the proposal again.
This time it reached him but he refused to believe Lady Byron no longer wanted to be married to him. He asked Augusta to write to her; in addition, he refused to dissolve their marriage. A short while later, when Lady Byron made clear her suspicions that Byron's relationship with his half-sister Augusta was incestuous, which was not then illegal, and that he had had homosexual relationships and had sodomised her - Lady Byron - which acts were, he changed his mind. He agreed to grant her request if she proved that the request for legal separation was truly hers and not that of her parents. In response, Lady Byron personally communicated her feelings to Leigh. Byron kept his word, and their separation was made legal in March 1816, in a private settlement.
Following the settlement, Leigh wrote to Lady Byron; the latter's solicitor replied to the private note. Byron was enraged by such cold treatment of his half-sister. Soon after the dissolution of his marriage, he left England and lived the remainder of his days abroad.
Though she wished to separate from Byron, Lady Byron was haunted by him until her death. She had tried hard to save his soul and secure him a place in Heaven. In the years following their separation, she came to believe that the time she had spent with Byron guaranteed he would experience God's embrace upon his death. She kept his letters, copies of her own to him, and letters about him. She carefully documented their relationship, supposedly in preparation for any challenge Byron may have made for custody of Ada.
He never did seek custody of his daughter, though he sent for both of them shortly before his death in Greece on April 19, 1824. Lady Byron was gratified by his final gesture. Her obsession with Byron did not end with his death. Ultimately her relationship with Byron defined her life, though she committed herself to social causes, such as prison reform and the abolition of slavery. In furtherance of the latter, Baroness Byron attended the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Conference, where she was one of the few women included in its commemorative painting.
Read more about this topic: Anne Isabella Byron, Baroness Byron
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Young, and so thin, and so straight.
So straight! as if nothing could ever bend her.
But poor men would bend her, and doing things with poor men,
Being much in bed, and babies would bend her over,
And the rest of things in life that were for poor women,
Coming to them grinning and pretty with intent to bend and to kill.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)