Excerpt from In Byron's Wake by Miranda Seymour, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Possibly, Lord Byron's very last thoughts were of his unseen daughter. William Fletcher, conveying the news of his master's death to John Murray on 21 April 1824, was anxious to stress that Byron's "pertickeler wish" had been that his valet should carry a message to his wife and child. Lady Byron, so Fletcher later noted, had broken down in sobs during that harrowing visit, weeping until her whole body shook as she begged him - vainly - to recall what her husband's final message to her had been. By the end of her own life, Annabella had convinced herself that some "unuttered" tender words had been thought, even if they had not been spoken.

*

The cheerful docility mentioned by Annabella in 1823 marked the emergence of an endearing trait in Ada's nature. Squabbles lay ahead, especially with a mother whose authority she often opposed, but Ada, throughout her life, would win affection by her good humor, her kindness and - unlike either of her parents - her quickness to forgive.

Ada had not always been so equable. Back in November 1821, when Lord Byron was renting a palace in Pisa, he heard that his six-year-old daughter was thought to be "a fine child," but one who possessed "a violent temper." The news troubled him less than it did a mother who had witnessed her husband's own ungovernable rages. What Byron began to fret about in Pisa was Ada's isolation. Listing the members of her family who lacked siblings, he reached a disconcerting result. There were his own mother, Augusta's mother, Augusta, he himself, Annabella and now young Ada: "Such a complication of only children... looks like fatality almost," he brooded in his journal. Pride returned to comfort him. After all, "the fiercest Animals have the rarest number in their litters - as Lions - tigers - and even Elephants," Byron could not help adding, "which are mild in comparison."

*

Initially, once Ada was weaned, she served only to remind her unhappy mother of the final weeks of a disastrous marriage. "My Child! Forgive the seeming wrong / The heart with-held from thee," Annabella wrote in a private poem dated 16 December 1819 and guiltily entitled "The Unnatural Mother." A month earlier, Annabella confessed that the first real evidence of Ada's affection had come as a huge relief: "I had a strange prepossession that she would never be fond of me."

The commencement of Lady Byron's relationship with her daughter was not made easier by the first of many breakdowns in Annabella's health. Back in 1816, following the tremendous strain imposed by her marital separation, she became nervous, unhappy and ill. It was a relief, then, after taking Ada off to Lowestoft to meet up with Mary Gosford and her own little girls during that summer, to bequeath her daughter to the care of Nurse Grimes and Lady Noel at Kirkby. Meanwhile, Annabella went to London to seek an independent abode in Hampstead, close to the sympathetic Baillie sisters and the intelligent, motherless daughters of their neighbor, a prosperous and pious Mr. Carr. In the summer of 1817, Annabella made just one brief halt at Kirkby Mallory before setting off on a tour of the Lake District with Miss Sarah Carr.

In September, following another hasty visit from her daughter, Judith Noel decided it was time to tweak her maternal conscience. Ada was declared to be missing her mamma. "She looked round the Bed and on the Bed, and then into the Closet - seemed disappointed and said ‘gone-gone!'"

The prod worked. Annabella returned home, to be rewarded with a scolding. Lady Noel possessed a notoriously sharp tongue, and it was one that Judith had not restrained on this occasion. Where would her daughter have been without Lady Noel's support in her time of need? Did she ever pause to consider the pain her separation had caused, or the social embarrassment which had compelled Judith to remove from public view Phillips's magnificently showy portrait of Lord Byron in order to nail it up in a box designated for the attic?

From In Byron's Wake: The Turbulent Lives of Lord Byron's Wife and Daughter. Courtesy of Pegasus Books. Copyright 2018 by Miranda Seymour.