The Whole Disgraceful Truth

Byron's lover, Lady Caroline Lamb, has often been portrayed as 'monster'. Gathered here for the first time are letters to and from some of her most famous correspondents, among them The Prince of Wales and Walter Scott. Her letters glitter with quips, puns, and searing self-knowledge as she reveals 'the whole disgraceful truth' of her life.

'This new edition of Caroline Lamb's 'Letters' is a valuable resource and a vital complement to Douglass's impressive biography of Lamb. With the publication of the 'Letters' we can see the human side of Lamb as well as her version of the events that were so infamously portrayed in her novel Glenarvon. Meticulously edited, this collection lets the 'Byronic heroine' speak in her own voice and rounds out the portrait of a woman who is becoming increasingly important in the romantic canon.' Diane Long Hoeveler, Marquette University, author of Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës.

'In his masterfully developed, scrupulously well-informed, groundbreaking edition, Paul Douglass presents her correspondence from girlhood to dying days - an unrivaled cache of letters, cascading with passion and punctuated with outbursts of verse, that constitute a trove of inestimable historical value and irresistible entertainment.' Susan J. Wolfson, Princeton University, editor of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and the poems and letters of Felicia Hemans

'This extraordinarily talented woman of letters now speaks for herself in an impressively researched volume, allowing us to understand a much maligned figure, as tormented as she was tormenting, in all of her fascinating complexity a must-read for anyone with a serious interest in Romantic-era literature, history, domestic politics, or feminist studies.' Paula R. Feldman, editor of British Women Poets of the Romantic Era and The Journals of Mary Shelley

'This volume impresses both by the thoroughness of its scholarship and by the light yet sure touch with which Paul Douglass conducts us through an eccentric, moving, pathetic, but courageous life in letters. Byron complains of the labours of reading a 'she-epistle' but there are few labours in this fascinating window into Regency England during the Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath and one of the greatest periods of Romantic Poetry.' Bernard Beatty, University of Liverpool, former editor of The Byron Journal

PAUL DOUGLASS is Professor of English and American Literature at San Jose State University, USA. He is the author of Lady Caroline Lamb: A Biography (Palgrave Macmillan 2004).