Keats-Shelley Journal Feature: Yasmin Solomonescu and Andrew Burkett

This post is the fifth in a series presenting blog publications from the authors featured in the latest volume of the Keats-Shelley Journal, Volume LXV. In these short pieces, authors reflect on their recent work and dialogue with other scholars in the discipline. Below is a summary/response submitted by Yasmin Solomonescu and Andrew Burkett addressing Solomonescu's article article 'Four Letters by Annabella and Lucy Byron'. This series is curated by Lindsey Seatter, for the Keats-Shelley Association of America Communications Team.Author: Yasmin Solomonescu, University of Notre DameMy essay 'Four Letters by Annabella and Lucy Byron' calls attention to previously unpublished letters—three by Lady Byron and one by a relative, Lucy Byron—in the Hesburgh Library at the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana, USA. The essay was sparked by the mention of some 'Byron letters' in Rare Books and Special Collections at the Hesburgh Library. They turned out not to be by the famous poet, but they were no less intriguing for it. The first two bore Lady Byron’s maiden and married names respectively, but only the second was dated; the other two were attributed to Lady Byron in library records, but one had no signature or date, and the other had no year and, uncharacteristically for Lady Byron, was nearly illegible. Among the portions of the latter I could make out on first reading were the tantalizing phrases 'In speaking of Lord Byron' and 'the affair'.In The Scholar Adventurers (1950), Richard D. Altick writes of the archival scholar’s being 'confronted with a vast jigsaw puzzle made up of countless fragments of truth, but may pieces [of which] are missing, and others … fitted into the wrong places' (14). Although it is unclear how a few pieces of the vast jigsaw puzzle of Lady Byron’s correspondence came to reside at the Hesburgh Library, their contents and contexts help fill out our picture of this fascinating figure, providing glimpses into an eventful sixty years.Letter 1, dating from around 1812, finds the young Anne Isabella Milbanke debuting in Regency high society and sharing her poetry with an unnamed friend, who might plausibly be Lord Byron. In Letter 2, written several months after Lord Byron’s death, (note: on p.32 of the published essay, the month given for Lord Byron’s death should be April, not May). Lady Byron intriguingly assures the Secretary of the London Greek Committee that she will fulfil his intentions with regard to certain 'papers transmitted from Greece'. Letter 3—actually a torn fragment of a letter composed from Wales around 1839—sheds light on the personal and philanthropic developments of the 1830s, which are more fully reconstructed in Julia Markus’s 2015 biography Lady Byron and Her Daughters. In Letter 4, composed some 14 years after Lady Byron’s death (and fifty after Lord Byron’s), their relation Lucy Byron finds herself called upon to address rekindled rumors of an incestuous affair. All together, these four letters carry us well beyond the famous satirical portrait of Lady Byron in Don Juan, attesting to a richly multifaceted life and character.Respondent: Andrew Burkett, Union CollegeIn her recent essay in the Keats-Shelley Journal (Vol. LXV 2016, 29-40), Yasmin Solomonescu conveys with both precision and excitement the challenges and rewards of breaking fresh ground in archival work in British Romantic studies. In the opening paragraphs of this lively and engaging article, Solomonescu reconstructs for readers the experience of mystery, intrigue, and recovery as well as the myriad questions and answers that have unfolded since her discovery of four new letters—three by Lady Byron and one by her relative, Lucy Byron—through the assistance of librarians in Rare Books and Special Collections at the Hesburgh Libraries at the University of Notre Dame. Identifying the biographical and historical reconstruction of these letters has taken Solomonescu on something of a media archaeological journey, as she has carefully analyzed through the help of her Notre Dame colleagues such matters as document watermark features, chirography (authorial handwriting and penmanship), as well as concerns related to the representation of these letters through republication in print. For me, though, what is perhaps most intriguing about her discovery and archival-biographical reconstruction are the ways in which this work sheds new light through a series of concrete, striking examples on how archival research continues to allow us to fill in what Solomonescu refers to as those 'gaps in the received picture' still punctuating our overall conception of Lady Byron’s life and personality (29). Indeed, Solomonescu’s scholarly practice and process have resulted in the fact that these four letters help to 'carry us well beyond the famous satirical portrait of Lady Byron in Don Juan, attesting to a richly multifaceted life and character', as revealed throughout this timely and compelling project.