The Kindness of Sisters: Annabella Milbanke and the Destruction of the Byrons

Description

This examination of Byron, marks an alternative approach to biography. Crane focuses on the lifelong feud between Augusta - Byron's half-sister with whom he had a passionate affair - and Annabella, his society wife. Recreating a meeting between the two, years after Byron's death - the Romantic "High Noon" - he explores the emotional and sexual truth and the human vulnerability that lie at the heart of the Byron story. The text is not only rigorous in its scholarship, but also a drama i itself. It combines passion, revenge and recrimination in 19th-century Britain with the intensity of a Greek tragedy.

David Crane read history and English at Oxford University. He has lectured at universities in America, Holland, Japan and Africa. He is the author of Lord Byron's Jackal, a biography of Edward Trelawny. He lives in London.

'In Lord Byron's Jackal, David Crane brings Edward Trelawny -- seaman, scoundrel, friend of Byron and Shelley startlingly to life. Here is a wonderful adventure story about a man who invented himself in the image of the Byronic hero and lived to the hilt the final passionate and violent flowering of Romanticism in the cause of Greek independence.' STELLA TILLYARD 'Fascinating and oddly disturbing, Crane vividly evokes the horror of a revolution in which both sides were equally brutal. His is a complex book, but as a narrative of mingled fraud and genius it is altogether convincing.' JAN MORRIS Independent