‘An Exaggerated Woman’: The Melodramas of Lady Caroline Lamb

Abstract

In his biography, The Young Melbourne and the Story of His Marriage with Caroline Lamb, David Cecil writes of Lady Caroline Lamb that, ‘Side by side run always two stories, what happened to Caroline and what she pretended had happened.’³ This is how Caroline Lamb is remembered in both biography and fiction alike: for confusing reality with fantasy; for behaving as though she were the heroine of a melodrama; for belonging, precisely, in the ‘wrong’ genre. Caroline Lamb’s name has become synonymous with melodrama and was used as an adjective for self-indulgent emotionalism even by Lord Byron himself, who described feeling, when his subsequent mistress, Lady Oxford left England, more ‘Carolinish’ about his loss than he had expected. Melodrama is failed tragedy, and Caroline Lamb’s life is seen as failing to be the tragedy she described it as being. Glenarvon, Lamb’s own novel about her brief affair with Byron during the spring and summer of 1812 (published the month after Byron left England for ever in 1816) has long been written off for being a melodrama rather than the historical account of their relations which everyone wanted to read. Caroline Lamb is thought to have turned her life into the stuff of romance and to have dramatised the gothic excesses of what Wordsworth scathingly called, in his preface to the Lyrical Ballads, ‘frantic novels’. Her ‘imagination’, Thomas Medwin reports Byron as saying, was ‘heated by novel reading which made her fancy herself the heroine of romance and led her into all sorts of eccentricities’.⁴

‘She is a good study for a couple of years at least’

— Byron to James Wedderburn Webster, of his relationship with Lady Caroline Lamb¹

‘Tell the truth; it is bad enough, but not what is worse’

— Lady Caroline Lamb to Thomas Medwin, of her relationship with Lord Byron²