Lady Caroline Lamb's influence on Emily Brontë

Only this for today: Anderson Valley Advertiser has an article on Lord Byron, his affair with Lady Caroline Lamb and her novel Glenarvon.

His affair with Lady Caroline Lamb, the spirited and eccentric wife of a future prime minister, offered an especially lurid proof of the byword’s sexual prowess. Lamb was seduced before she had met Byron at Holland House, an intellectual headquarters for English liberals. Once introduced, she told her diary, “That beautiful pale face will be my fate,” becoming so instantly intoxicated that Annabella Milbanke likened her to a rabid dog: “I really thought that Lady Caroline had bit half the company,” she wrote, “and communicated the Nonsense mania.” Despite being raised to privilege and wealth, Lamb had endured an almost feral childhood, brought up in the wilderness of a mansion with a distant mother and father and little formal schooling in spite of unusual intelligence. From the start of their relationship, Byron and the “evil genius,” as Byron dubbed Lamb, behaved as if they were characters in one of his poems, establishing elaborate games of courtship that included cross-dressing and sex by proxy. She sent him gifts of her pubic hair and asked for his blood by return of post. Byron recoiled at an imagination “heated by novel reading.” Wearying of her histrionics, he took respite in the arms of her rival Lady Oxford, sending Caroline into a fit of near insanity from which it took her several years to recover.
      Part of her rehabilitation involved the composition of a novel, Glenarvon, written in secret while dressed as a man. A roman à clef of thinly veiled portraits of the entire Holland House set in which she moved, it was remarkable not only for a sustained emotional pitch that bordered on incoherence, but also for its caricature of the affair in which she portrayed herself as the ethereal waif Calantha and Byron as the Irish rebel Lord Glenarvon. Glenarvon is the prototypical demon lover, part Vicomte de Valmont, part Samuel Richardson’s Lovelace, and easily seen as the forerunner of Emily Brontë's Heathcliff, stalking ruined priories, howling like a dog at the moon, showing to his victims a face that glowered “as if the soul of passion had been stamped and printed upon every feature.” Drawn inextricably to the powerless Calantha, he announces “my love is death,” while plunging into a sadomasochistic liaison that results in her utter degradation: “Weep,” cries Glenarvon, binding her tighter to him, “I like to see your tears; they are the last tears of expiring virtue. Henceforward you will shed no more.” (Andrew McConnell Stott)