The Slaveries of Sex, Race, and Mind: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Lady Byron Vindicated

Harriet Beecher Stowe's notorious 1869 exposé, "The True Story of Lady Byron's Life," has quite plausibly been described as "the most sensational magazine article of the nineteenth century,"¹ but as is often the case with sensations it has tended to be talked about much more than understood. Stowe's nominal project in the "True Story" was the defense of the poet Lord Byron's wife against criticism levied against her in the British and American press both before and after her death in 1860, and she continued advocating on her behalf the following year in a subsequent, stand-alone treatment titled Lady Byron Vindicated (1870). Her larger aim, however, was to strike a blow in the service of women's rights, with Stowe attempting in her Byron studies to refine her earlier thinking about the institution of slavery and to expand its definition in such a way that it could be applied to the condition of women in the United States and elsewhere. But her project's fate is a textbook illustration of the grievous consequences that can occur when an example used in the service of an argument overshadows the argument itself, as it was the inflammatory means by which Stowe made her point that received the most attention during her lifetime and afterwards.

First aired in America's Atlantic Monthly and England's MacMillan's, Stowe's polemic could not have been better designed to provoke controversy. The "True Story" proclaimed in a public forum the long-whispered rumor that Lord Byron had carried on an incestuous affair with his half sister and had fathered a daughter by her, and the reaction was swift, angry, and damaging for nearly everyone involved. Partisans of Lord Byron and defenders of his memory were predictably incensed, claiming that the story would permanently besmirch his reputation and that his wife had fed it to Stowe out of disloyalty and deceit. A large contingent of Stowe's audience was horrified that she would so exceed the boundaries of propriety and pollute mainstream publications with salacious subject matter, with fifteen thousand of the Atlantic's subscribers (about one third of the readership) canceling in protest and almost wrecking the magazine in what Oliver Wendell Holmes dubbed "the Byron whirlwind."² And Stowe, who was of course no stranger to controversy, stood to lose a great deal. The Atlantic survived and the poet's work ended up suffering little in its popularity and critical esteem, but Stowe's career was not the same after 1870. Forrest Wilson, one of Stowe's early biographers, despaired in 1941 that after the Byron affair, "Never again would she stand alone as the supreme female figure in the American scene. . . . Today with the millions the most conspicuous and influential American woman of the 1850's and 1860's is but a name—the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin—she who deserved to be remembered for so much else."³ Stowe's later writing, of course, now has a more secure place in the academy than it did when Wilson wrote her literary obituary, but the sheer peculiarity of the imbroglio still lingers: why would the author of the nineteenth century's best-selling novel jeopardize her career in such spectacular fashion, airing an allegation that was all but certain to inflame the public and yet was unlikely to benefit anyone other than Lady Byron, a woman whom Stowe considered a friend but who had been dead for nearly a decade?

Until relatively recently, scholars who discussed Stowe's Byron texts mainly concerned themselves with the veracity of their allegations and the motivations that led Stowe to make them, with most concluding either that she made a fool of herself or that Lady Byron rather craftily took advantage of her. Biographies of the poet have varied a great deal over the years, but one constant has been the tendency to dismiss Stowe as a hack and to treat Lady Byron's collaboration with her as an expression of vanity and revenge: in 1925, John Drinkwater...