Author(s): Julia Markus
Biography | Staff Picks | December 2020
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Far from a victim or an obstacle to Lord Byron's work, Lady Byron was a rebel against the fashionable snobbery of her class, founding the first Infants School and Co-Operative School in England. A poet and a talented mathematician, Lady Byron supported the education of her precocious daughter, Ada Lovelace, now recognised as a pioneer of computer science and she saved from death her "adoptive daughter", Medora Leigh, the child of Lord Byron's incestuous affair with his sister. Lady Byron was adored by the younger abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe and by many notable friends. Yet her complex relationships with her family, including the sister Byron loved, runs like a live wire through this skillfully told, ground-breaking biography of a remarkable woman who made a life for herself and became a leading light in her century.
Who needs fiction when history is this rich, interesting and exciting. Julia Markus is a great story teller and this is a fantastic story about a remarkable woman during a time when women had very few rights. Read it, you won't regret it.
Alicia, The Book Grocer
Julia Markus, the author of three acclaimed biographies, is the director of creative writing and a professor of English at Hofstra University. She lives in New York City.
