While Crane's first book, Lord Byron's Jackal: A Life of Edward John Trelawny, expanded Byron's unreliable friend from a biographic footnote into a full-blown Byronic antihero, this elliptical, tartly written and idiosyncratic new study expands on the epilogue to the poet's death in 1824: relations between his half-sister and lover, Augusta, and her sometime ally, avowed friend and lifelong rival, Lady Byron, née Annabella Milbanke. In the process, Crane traces Byron's constantly shifting reputation and sets up Annabella's life, which spanned 18th-century Whig aristocracy, Regency society realpolitik, one year of Romantic agony and more than 40 years of ruthless Victorian rectitude, as "in miniature the story of the age." She had hoped to reform the famous author of Childe Harold
and would turn her redemptive efforts to their daughter, Ada, and to Augusta and her daughter, Medora (rumored to be Byron's child). Annabella's financial cajolery and evangelical morality proved unevenly matched with the Byron gene for infamy. Ada developed a gambling mania and died young; Medora's notorious teenage seduction turned her against her mother; and Augusta, with her tainted reputation, was reduced to quasi-dependence on her sister-in-law. At the heart of the account is Crane's awkwardly dramatic and expository "imaginary dialogue" of the last meeting of the aging Augusta and Annabella, in 1851. Overall he displays a keen understanding of his subjects' vacillating and ambiguous motives. Even the repressed Annabella, he suggests, always loved Byron, the figure of Romantic and sexual freedom. 16 pages of b&w photos. (Sept. 26)
