Secret

The Strange Marriage of Annabella Milbanke and Lord Byron

By Ashley Hay

2000

First Published

3.41

Average Rating

274

Number of Pages

8H22M

Audio Length

A compelling addition to the hugely popular subject of Lord Byron. Ashley Hay, a young and superbly talented writer, has written a compellingly readable account of one of the strangest and most mysterious episodes in his life. In January 1815, Lord Byron married Annabella Milbanke. He was London's most famous poet and its most desirably notorious lover, and everyone wanted to be his wife. She was a young lady with handsome prospects and good connections, but painfully shy and retiring. They had met only a couple of times before she had turned down his first proposal: after the unlikely correspondence that then ensued between them she accepted his second, but they saw each other only once more before their wedding day. After only a year of marriage, and just a month after the birth of their first child. Annabella left Byron and went home to her parents, never to see him again. The misdemeanours in her husband's conduct she subsequently hinted at scandalised London - and the lurid speculation as to the sensational secret she never quite revealed has continued ever since. Painstakingly pieced together from their diaries and letters. The Secret is a sensitive and poignant portrait of the celebrity couple of their day, whose strange marriage became a cause celebre of Regency England, and its account of a vulnerable, wronged woman abandoned to her horrifying secret has the compulsiveness of the best fiction. The length of a compact novel, it will appeal to everyone who has enjoyed a recent bestseller like Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.

Avg Rating

3.41

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

4 STARS

44%

3 STARS

29%

2 STARS

15%

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

Ashley Hay

Author · 9 books

Ashley Hay’s new novel, A Hundred Small Lessons, was published in Australia, the US and the UK and was shortlisted for categories in the 2017 Queensland Literary Awards. Set in her new home city of Brisbane, it traces the intertwined lives of two women from different generations through a story of love, and of life. It takes account of what it means to be mother or daughter; father or son and tells a rich and intimate story of how we feel what it is to be human, and how place can transform who we are. Her previous novel, The Railwayman’s Wife, was published in Australia, the UK, the US, and is heading for translation into Italian, French and Dutch. It won the Colin Roderick Prize (awarded by the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies), as well as the People's Choice award in the 2014 NSW Premier's Prize, and was also longlisted for both the Miles Franklin and Nita B. Kibble awards. Her first novel, The Body in the Clouds (2010), was shortlisted for categories in the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the NSW and WA premier’s prizes, and longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her previous books span fiction and non-fiction and include Gum: The Story of Eucalypts and Their Champions (2002), Museum (2007; with visual artist Robyn Stacey), and Best Australian Science Writing 2014 (as editor)s A writer for more than 20 years, her essays and short stories have appeared in volumes including the Griffith Review, Best Australian Essays (2003), Best Australian Short Stories (2012), and Best Australian Science Writing (2012), and have been awarded various accolades in Australia and overseas. In 2016, she received the Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing.