ABSTRACT
The first major poem Lord Byron published after his disgrace in 1816 was addressed to his daughter Ada. It concluded by three times prophesying her future unquenchable love for him—even were he dead and his name proscribed by adults. Ada’s contemporaries responded to the poet’s appeal with hero-worship. The phenomenal popularity of Byron’s poetry, his personality cult and the fact he most fully embodied the Romantic egoism which the Victorian age repudiated: all this made it mandatory to ‘Close thy Byron; Open thy Goethe’. The literary daughters of Byron were, like all Victorian novelists, ambivalent about the Romantic movement in proportion to its overwhelming impact on them. By the time romantic love was redefined by Byron as anti-social passion incompatible with marriage, the bourgeois courtship genre that women had made their own had run its course. Jane Austen had ironized it and made the banality of quotidian domesticity amusing.
