The Whole Disgraceful Truth: Selected Letters of Lady Caroline Lamb

Lady Caroline Lamb was described by her lover, Lord Byron, as having a heart like a "little volcano" and as "the cleverest most agreeable, absurd, amiable, perplexing, dangerous fascinating little being that lives now or ought to have lived 2000 years ago." She wrote witty and revealing letters to fellow writers like Lady Morgan, William Godwin, Robert Malthus, and Amelia Opie, and to her publishers John Murray and Henry Colburn, to her cousins Hart, Georgiana, and Harrio, as well as to her mother, husband, son, and lovers. In those letters, she told her correspondents "the whole disgraceful truth" of her drug and alcohol addictions, her affairs with Sir Godfrey Vassal Webster, Lord Byron, and Michael Bruce, and her jealousy of her cousin Georgiana (whom William Lamb had "adored" before proposing to Caroline). She also revealed her efforts to make a happy life for her mentally retarded, epileptic son, Augustus, and her determination to become a respected writer of fiction and poetry.

Author: P. Douglass
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Published: 05/23/2006
Pages: 250
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 8.54h x 6.04w x 0.80d
ISBN13: 9781403969583
ISBN10: 1403969582
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
- Literary Collections | Letters
- Biography & Autobiography | General

About the Author
PAUL DOUGLASS is Professor of English and American Literature at San Jose State University, USA. He is the author of Lady Caroline Lamb: A Biography (Palgrave Macmillan 2004).