Glenarvon - Lady Caroline Lamb
So, there has been quite a gap since I last wrote. Those of you who know me will know that this is because I have been slaving away writing, first, assignments for my two modules this semester and since, commencing work upon my 15,000 word MA thesis. I am greatly looking forward to being able to resume “normal” service and blog more regularly and finally get to reviewing some of the books that have been sitting on my shelves for ages and ages, but for now… I give you Glenarvon.
Glenarvon is one of the novels I’ve been reading as part of my MA thesis on the changing representation and role of the vampire in 19th Century English Literature from Polidori to Stoker, even though Glenarvon predates Polidori’s The Vampyre by three years. The basic premise of Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel as a satiric roman à clef is fairly promising; for those of you who don’t know, Lamb, or “Caro” as she was fondly known, had an affair with the notorious Baron George Gordon Byron, or Lord Byron, as he is more commonly known, Romantic poet, exile and celebrity figure extraordinaire. Lamb never got over the affair, which only lasted for four months in 1812 and wrote several pieces of fiction that drew heavily on autobiography to shape the plot. Glenarvon is one of these and was first published four years after the affair ended in 1816, which (un)coincidentally was the first year of Byron’s exile from England. Needless to say, because the autobiographical elements and character portrayals are so transparent, the novel wasn’t particularly well received when it was first released to the public and a lot of people, especially those on whom characters of the novel were based, took enormous offence to Lamb’s writing. Some of the themes and events that run throughout are vampirism, adultery, infanticide… So, with all this in mind, we should be expecting something pretty meaty and scandalous, right?
Wrong. Glenarvon is one of the worst-written pieces of Romantic or Gothic anything I’ve ever read, perhaps with the exception of a pretty atrocious Gothic Bluebook I read as part of a module I was doing before Christmas. One of my biggest pet peeves is not knowing who’s speaking during dialogue and in Glenarvon it is never clear. Different characters interrupt each other and make interjections constantly without it being made explicit who is speaking. The plot is, despite all the promise it shows, strung out for far too long and a bit thin in places. Glenarvon himself doesn’t even come into it until chapter 35, a third of the way through the book, and Calantha, the female protagonist, dies a good 15 chapters from the end. The elements of subplot that are vaguely introduced are all rushed to a very contrived conclusion at the end. The infanticide turns out not to be an infanticide, because the baby we all thought had been murdered was in fact spirited away because the murderer hadn’t the heart to go through with it. Instead, he replaces the baby with another that looks like it that he HAS murdered. So it is still an infanticide, and how on earth Lamb thinks it’s not so bad any more because the rich baby didn’t die and a poor baby did, I don’t know. Nothing that’s actually exciting is given the dramatic treatment it ought to have, and the most mundane things are given far too much page space.
Throughout the novel, Lamb slips from commenting upon Calantha’s conduct depracatingly into first person narrative and obsessive moping over the fact that Byron abandoned her. She even quotes from one of the actual letters Byron sent her ending their affair. It’s not really a surprise that the year this was published, Lamb’s family tried to have her committed to a mental asylum. To say the least, she wasn’t the most stable individual in the world and this is rather prominently evident throughout Glenarvon. Unfortunately, unlike her protagonist and every other woman in the novel who is seduced by Lord Glenarvon, Lamb’s obsession with Byron did not kill her. She didn’t live to a ripe old age (nobody did in those days), which is probably a blessing, but she did live long enough to write this and a couple of other books, neither of which were critically acclaimed any more than Glenarvon was. If only dying of a broken heart were possible… (in the proverbial sense, obviously, rather than actually having cardiovascular problems)
Having said all this, however, there is some essay-writing gold in there. The basic argument I’m going to make with Glenarvon is how Lamb’s portrayal of Lord Glenarvon corresponds with what have since been defined as the attributes of the Byronic vampire, how it relates to Polidori’s The Vampyre and how Glenarvon himself embodies social tensions regarding the political situation between England and Ireland. I’m told it should be good so fingers crossed. It’s just a shame I had to read such a dreadful novel to get to the material I need.
Lamb, Lady Caroline [1816] Glenarvon (1995) London: Everyman
