Byron's doomed tribe

Lord George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron of Rochdale, was the Martin Amis/David Beckham/Stephen Bing of his day. Having challenged the literary establishment in 1812 with the startling originality and sardonic disrespect of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, he became - with his glowering yet lusciously soft features - the darling of the Regency salons, swooned over by young girls in a tide of hysteria (public outbursts of mania are nothing new).

But he was doomed from the start. Brilliance may have its allure, but rarely can it sustain the steely observation of a jealous and leaden-minded public.

When Caroline Lamb threatened suicide for love of him, this was only a warning of what would follow: marital rape (possible), incest (probable), adultery (certain), child murder (well, it depends who you believe).

Indeed, you would have thought there was enough of the soap opera about Byron and his unfortunate tribe of women for writers not to feel the need to fictionalise it. But in this strange melange of a book David Crane has not only succumbed to the urge, he has gone further by creating a dramatic portrait of two women whom he depicts as worthy rivals to any Peggy Mitchell or Deirdre Barlow.

Annabella Milbanke met her future husband just after he had ruefully noted that he "woke one morning and found myself famous". The spoilt and highly intelligent child of wealthy parents, she saw in him the perfect Cause for her reforming zeal; he saw in her - well, that's the puzzle. Byron could have had any woman, and Annabella was certainly not especially attractive or wealthy and definitely not sexy. And yet, suggests Crane, their marriage could have worked; an alliance of opposites, Annabella's enlightened, mathematical mind cooling Byron's Romantic passion.

Annabella's mistake was to refuse, haughtily, his first proposal of marriage: it ensured that he would ask again (after all, who could resist a woman who turns away the hottest man in town?) and allowed Fate to intervene in the person of Augusta Leigh, Byron's half-sister, daughter of his reckless, ruthless, alcoholic father, "Mad Jack" Byron. Where Annabella was a prim, stiff woman - Byron nicknamed her the Princess of Parallelograms - Augusta was sultry, sensual and, according to Crane, extraordinarily submissive.

She surrendered, in Crane's interpretation, to Byron's seduction, opening up the tortured path to Hell for all three of them.

"The compelling truths of this narrative lie in the regions for which the traditional tools of history and biography are simply not enough," says Crane. And part-way through his book he breaks into drama to recreate, in imaginative style, the meeting that took place in April 1851 between the upright Victorian harridan that Lady Byron became and her meek, worn-down half-sister-in-law Augusta, long after Byron's death in 1824 at Missolonghi.

It's a powerfully written scene (enhanced by the aptly chosen portraits of Annabella from sunny child to wizened widow), and Crane is deeply immersed in his subject (his 1998 book on Edward Trelawny, the adventurer and biographer of Byron, was widely praised). But it reads like a Victorian melodrama. Indeed, Crane later suggests that Annabella was the inspiration for Dickens's blighted spinster Miss Havisham, who, unlike Annabella, was thwarted before she even reached the altar rail, and thereafter trapped herself in a time warp, clinging to her bridal muslin (whereas Lady Byron threw herself into good works).

It's difficult to see what the point of all this is, other than another attempt to popularise history by giving it a tabloid gloss. The real characters of these women never emerge, suppressed by Crane's desire to eulogise his hero Byron and make soap villains of his female entourage. And yet their story is real enough, tragic enough, painful enough to engage the reader without any false emoting. Byron may have been a genius, but he was never blessed with "kindness" as Crane would have us believe (he makes no mention of Claire Clairmont, whose daughter by Byron was seized by him and placed in a convent, where she died, aged five, of neglect). And any "destruction" was entirely due to his own self-inflicted wounds - as he would have been only too willing to acknowledge.