Lady Caroline Lamb and Miss Elizabeth Spence: limits of femininity in early nineteenth-century salon and album culture

In November 1825 middle-class salon hostess and travel writer Elizabeth Spence contributed a short poem titled ‘M.S. Lines on Lady Caroline Lamb’ to Anna Birkbeck’s album. Spence’s choice of subject, Lady Caroline Lamb, was, in many ways, unusual. Coming from a very different world to Spence, the aristocratic Lamb was a household name, most well known for her much publicized personal life, which included a disastrous love affair with Lord George Gordon Byron. Through a close reading of Spence’s poem, this article interrogates the ‘friendship’ between these two women of differing classes and backgrounds and considers the complex gender and social dynamics at play informing Spence’s ambiguous poem. The album, like the salon, existed within the space between the masculine/public and the feminine/private worlds. It is in this space that it is possible to explore the limits of femininity in the early nineteenth century, as its semi-public position enables a view of the fringes of what society deemed acceptable, and what provoked dissent for overstepping. As one famed for her overstepping, Lamb demonstrated the risks and the penalty for pushing these boundaries, but Spence’s poem offers a more complex, and even contradictory, picture of Lamb and by extension the limitations which condemned her.