Fiction:A Quiet Adjustment By Benjamin Markovits Faber, 328pp. £12.99He may have been mad, bad and dangerous to know, as one spurned lover, Lady Caroline Lamb, described him, but Lord George Gordon Byron, 19th-century poet and profligate, was never dull and the life he lived of lovers aplenty, both men and women, of excess, exile and rebellion, has provided ample fodder for storytellers over the years.
Would-be biographers are guaranteed an instant page-turner in a mere rehash of well-documented details while film-makers are granted, in his curled locks, renowned devilish charm, even the legendary limp - and his early death - the original lady-killing hero.
An easy route, then, for a novelist choosing as his subject the famous Romantic, would have been to focus solely on Byron himself. With three acclaimed novels under his belt when he embarked on a fictional trilogy about the poet, Benjamin Markovits had proven himself equal to the task of bringing to larger-than-life the 19th-century legend. What's particularly impressive is that in taking on Byron the US-born novelist chose to approach him in slowly decreasing circles that manage to shed more light on one of history's most fictionalised creations by declining to shine it on him directly.
In the first book of his Byron trilogy, Imposture, Markovits focused on Byron's one-time physician, John Polidori, a man whose attempts to emulate his patient served to bring about his own downfall. In this second volume of the trilogy, A Quiet Adjustment, Markovits takes on Anne Isabella Milbanke, known as Annabella, whose short-lived marriage to the poet earned her the lifelong title of Lady Byron, and who was often dismissed by adoring Byron biographers as an imperious prude whose priggish sense of virtue was ill-matched to the extreme passions of her rakish spouse. Markovits, however, paints a fuller portrait, and under his careful scrutiny a gifted, self-aware if also self-satisfied woman emerges from the wreckage of the relationship that was to define her historically.
Like almost every woman who crossed his path, Annabella is immediately drawn to the famed poet, whom she first glimpses at a dance she is invited to by her cousin, Byron's one-time lover Lady Caroline Lamb, and to which, after much characteristic analysis, she deigns to give "the sanction of her attendance". Her second sighting of London's incipient celebrity comes at a lecture on poetry, but despite her eagerness to discuss his newly-published narrative poem Childe Harold, she is dissuaded by the throngs who gather round him, and her strict sense of propriety combined with an instinctive shyness preclude her from any approach.
BYRON IS BY then already basking in a new-found stardom, but Annabella is finally granted an opportunity to indulge her growing desire to rescue his blackening soul when a number of social shoulder-rubbings result in his abruptly seeking out her hand in marriage via a letter to her aunt. While not immune to his magnetism, Annabella declines the offer, though not before offering a frank assessment of his character in which she recognises that "one of the benefits to be expected from any prolonged intercourse with Lord Byron is that he might, as they say, knock the wind out of me; I should be forced to draw new breath". Their correspondence doesn't end there, however, and the epistolary relationship which develops leads her to accept a second proposal two years on, when the rich heiress finally marries the original Byronic hero.
The tempestuous, abusive year of their unhappy union is chronicled in a book that astounds with its stylistic precision, written as it is in pitch-perfect 19th-century English prose by a 21st-century Texan. Markovits so deftly recreates the consciousness of a precocious 19-year-old girl coming of age in Romantic England that her devotion to the mercurial poet is as convincing as her subsequent steely emergence from his fierce hold. The novelist uses his obvious intimacy with his subject and the period as a springboard for a broader examination of notions of innocence and experience, moralities prescribed and unlearned, and questions of celebrity and ego that resonate today.
There is a sense that Markovits may have had too much raw material; that an attempt to contain his teeming subject matter within the confines of the meeting and marriage of Lord and Lady Byron, and their subsequent struggle for the soul and affections of his sister Augusta, with Markovits putting flesh on the widely rumoured incestuous relationship between the siblings, comes at the expense of a cohesive whole. But while A Quiet Adjustment lacks the satisfying narrative neatness that its Jane Austenesque prose may lead the reader to expect, it offers us a heroine to rival Emma Woodhouse or Elizabeth Bennet, a historical character given new breath through Markovits's accomplished novel.
Fiona McCann is a freelance journalist