Lord Byron's novel
Subtitle: the evening land
By: John Crowley.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: William Morrow
Published: 2005
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 465
Subjects: Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron, 1788-1824 -- Fiction.; Lovelace, Ada King, Countess of, 1815-1852 -- Fiction.; Manuscripts -- Collectors and collecting -- Fiction.; Fiction -- Authorship -- Fiction.; Fathers and daughters -- Fiction.; Literary historians -- Fiction.; Poets -- Fiction.
Genres: Fiction.
Other titles: Evening land
Description: On a stormy night at Lord Byron's Swiss villa, Mary Shelley challenged her host, her husband and herself to write a ghost story. Mary's, of course, became Frankenstein. Byron supposedly soon gave up his--but, Crowley asks, what if he didn't? The result is this brilliant gothic novel of manners enclosed in two frames. In one, Byron's manuscript comes into the hands of Ada, his daughter by his estranged wife. Ada, in reality, became famous as a proto-cyberneticist, having collaborated on mathematician Charles Babbage's "difference engine." In Crowley's novel, Ada ciphers Byron's work into a kind of code in order to keep it from her mother. The second frame consists of the contemporary discovery of Ada's notes on Byron's story by Alexandra Novak, who's researching Ada for a Web site dedicated to the history of women in science. Alex is, a little too conveniently, the estranged daughter of a Byron scholar and filmmaker; her interest in Ada dovetails with her father's interest in Byron, and she's fascinated by the notes and the code both.