Lady Caroline Lamb was described by her lover, Lord Byron, as having a heart like a “little volcano” and as “the cleverest most agreeable, absurd, amiable, perplexing, dangerous fascinating little being that lives now or ought to have lived 2000 years ago.” She wrote witty and revealing letters to fellow writers like Lady Morgan, William Godwin, Robert Malthus, and Amelia Opie, and to her publishers John Murray and Henry Colburn, to her cousins Hart, Georgiana, and Harrio, as well as to her mother, husband, son, and lovers. In those letters, she told her correspondents “the whole disgraceful truth” of her drug and alcohol addictions, her affairs with Sir Godfrey Vassal Webster, Lord Byron, and Michael Bruce, and her jealousy of her cousin Georgiana (whom William Lamb had “adored” before proposing to Caroline). She also revealed her efforts to make a happy life for her mentally retarded, epileptic son, Augustus, and her determination to become a respected writer of fiction and poetry.

Paul Douglass is Professor of English and American Literature at San Jose State University in California, where he has been on the faculty since 1990. He directs the Master’s Program in English and the Steinbeck Fellows Program of SJSU. In the past, Douglass has served as chair of the Department and Principal Investigator for the California Reading and Literature Project. He has previously taught in the Writing Program and English Department at UCLA. Douglass lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains with his wife, Charlene, and their cats.

“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