The Secret: The Strange Marriage of Annabella Milbanke and Lord Byron

In January 1815, Lord Byron married Annabella Milbanke. He was London's most famous poet and its most desirably notorious lover, and everyone wanted to be his wife. She was a young lady with handsome prospects and good connections, but painfully shy and retiring. They had met only a couple of times before she had turned down his first proposal. After more courtship, she accepted his second proposal, but they saw each other only once more before their wedding day. After only a year of marriage, and just a month after the birth of their first child, Annabella left Byron and went home to her parents, never to see him again. At the base of it all was her secret, the hidden and despicable thing that caused her to leave. She never stopped thinking about it but never revealed the horror and enormity of what it was. It defined her, more than anything else she ever did. And it defined Byron -- not as the country's leading poet, but as someone about whom it was possible to say anything and everything. And have it believed. Set against the peculiar morals and social constraints of Regency England, this volume is the story of the Byrons' strange and scandalous marriage, all fifty-four weeks of it, and everything that it was possible to turn it into.