Sexual Politics: Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Byrons

Kimberly VanEsveld Adams

Harriet Beecher Stowe endured blistering criticism on both sides of the Atlantic when she published her account of Lord and Lady Byron’s marriage, Lady Byron Vindicated, in 1870. She shared with the world the confidences her friend Lady Byron had made to her in the mid-1850s. The most notorious was (in Lady Byron’s words): “Mrs. Stowe, he was guilty of incest with his sister!” In this paper I will explore two questions. The first is why Stowe came to the defense of her friend. After all, it was back in 1815 that Byron and his bride, Annabella Milbanke, had made a disastrous marriage and separated after only a year. By 1870, both Byrons were dead, and the story was generally out. My second question is how Stowe’s childhood love of the poet and her relationship with Lady Byron shaped her fiction, especially The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862).

While scholars have identified Byronic heroes and heroines throughout Stowe’s work, almost nothing has been said about Moses Pennel, the male protagonist of Pearl. Moses has Byron’s looks and temperament and is similarly a rebel against God. But Stowe was also influenced by two later authors: Emily Bronte (Wuthering Heights, 1847) and George Eliot (The Mill on the Floss, 1861). The brother-sister relationship in these two novels helps us identify the most troubling Byronic element in Pearl. It may also suggest an unacknowledged motive for Stowe’s subsequent publication of Lady Byron Vindicated. Stowe was officially horrified by the secret she had heard from Lord Byron’s widow. But on some creative level, it seems, she was also fascinated.