Astarte: a Fragment of Truth
Sir Francis Hastings Doyle to Lady Byron, 9 July 1816
“Your feelings I perfectly understand, I will even whisper to you I approve. . . . But you must remember that your position is very
extraordinary, and though when we have sufficiently deliberated and decided,
we should pursue our course without embarrassing ourselves with the consequences, yet we should not
neglect the means of fully justifying ourselves if the necessity be ever imposed upon us. I see the
possibility of a con-
conversation and manner, with something young about the
still well-cut face, the light in her eyes and agreeable voice. She spelt her name
Therese in all the signatures I have seen. 1 Colonel Doyle to Lady Byron, July 9th, 1816. 2 [See Chapters IX. and X.; also Introduction, p. ix.—Ed.] 3 Sir Leslie Stephen said it
made him quite uncomfortable to read Mrs. Leigh’s
letters of humiliation dated 1816. That she could have written as she did, considering all the
circumstances of the whole miserable story seemed “to imply the sort of moral idiocy of
which Lady Byron speaks. To print the letters would seem
to be superfluous and any superfluous printing would, on my view, be a mistake.” (Letter
to the Earl of Lovelace, April 1st, 1900.) |
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| MANFRED |
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tingency under which the fullest explanation of the motives and grounds of your
conduct may be necessary, I therefore implore of you to suffer no delicacy to interfere with your
endeavouring to obtain the fullest admission of the fact. . . . If you
obtain an acknowledgment of the facts and that your motives be, as you seem to think, properly
appreciated, I think on the whole we shall have reason to rejoice that you have acted as you have
done, but I shall be very anxious to have a more detailed knowledge of what has passed and
particularly of the state in which you leave it.
“The step you have taken was attended with great risk, and I could not,
contemplating the danger to which it might have exposed you, have originally advised it. If however
your correspondence has produced an acknowledgment of the fact even previous to your marriage I
shall be most happy that it has taken place.”
Hon. Augusta Mary Leigh [née Byron] (1783-1851)
Byron's half-sister; the daughter of Amelia Darcy, Baroness Conyers, she married
Lieutenant-Colonel George Leigh on 17 August 1807.
Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904)
Educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, he was a critic, man of letters, and editor of the
Dictionary of National Biography.
