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Bad Books/Bad Blood: Feminism, Eugenics, and Culture in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Lady Byron Vindicated

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

M. Lynn Byrd
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Extract

In September 1869, Harriet Beecher Stowe published “The True Story of Lady Byron's Life” in the Atlantic Monthly and Macmillan's Magazine. Public outcry was so great that less than a year later she published Lady Byron Vindicated: A History of the Byron Controversy, From Its Beginning in 1816 to the Present Time. This was a four-hundred-page volume that defended not only Lady Byron but also Mrs. Stowe. The book only fanned the flames of rebuke and debate. From 1869 to 1870, at least forty-one review articles of Stowe's work were published, including a response by Mark Twain. In the same time period, eight books were published in response, including Medora Leigh's autobiography. It announces in its subtitle that it contains “an introduction and commentary of the charges brought against Lord Byron by Mrs. Beecher Stowe” (Leigh defends the poet).

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 23 , October 1998 , pp. 147 - 169
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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References

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