Lady Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit
Antonia Fraser
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25)
THE eminent biographer and historian Lady Antonia Fraser observes in the prologue to her new book that it can act as a coda to the late-Georgian volumes that preceded it: the first concerning the reformation (albeit limited) of the UK Parliament through the Great Reform Act of 1832, the second, the equally glacial advance towards emancipation, culminating in the Catholic Relief Act in 1829, and Caroline Sheridan Norton’s less well-known, but no less significant campaign for the rights of married women. In contrast to these prime examples of political, religious and social struggle for the common good, the short, at once volatile and melancholy life of Lady Caroline Lamb, née Ponsonby (1785–1828), was one confined, partly through societal conventions, to personal strife.
An intelligent, creative, ‘elfin’ child, Caroline came from an Anglo-Irish family who