In Byron’s Wake

Miranda Seymour
Victoria Hall
15 Oct 2019 8:00pm - 9:30pm

In Byron’s Wake: the turbulent lives of Lord Byron’s wife and daughter, Annabella Milbanke and Ada Lovelace

Miranda Seymour, novelist, biographer and critic

In 1815, Annabella Milbanke married the notorious and brilliant Lord Byron, only to flee one year later, taking with her their baby daughter, the future Ada Lovelace.

Annabella became one of the most progressive reformers of Victorian England. Praised during her life as a paragon of virtue, within ten years of her death she was vilified as a disgrace to her sex.  Ada combined her scholarly education with a rebellious spirit and visionary imagination. She amplified her explanations of Charles Babbage’s unbuilt calculating engine to predict the dawn of the modern computer age.

Miranda Seymour reveals the way in which Byron, long after his death, continued to shape the lives and reputations of both these women.

Miranda Seymour is a novelist, biographer and critic. She is the award-winning author of In my Father’s House, the subject of an earlier HLSI lecture, and she has written many biographies, including lives of Mary Shelley, Robert Graves and Ottoline Morrell.