The mystery of Allegra Byron, Lord Byron’s illegitimate daughter, who died at age five in an Italian monastery, is back in the news. Recent discoveries in the monastery’s archives, presented at the 48th International Byron Conference in Missolonghi, shed new light on her fate.
According to amna.gr, Allegra Byron died on April 20, 1822, likely from typhoid or malaria, at the Bagnacavallo nunnery near Ravenna. Her death led Byron to request that her remains be sent to England for burial at Harrow, his alma mater. Despite his wishes, the church refused to bury her in the cemetery due to her illegitimacy and Byron’s scandalous reputation, leaving her burial site unknown.
Allegra’s mother never stopped blaming Byron for his decision to send her daughter to the monastery. The two had separated, their relations were already nearly hostile, and Byron stubbornly refused to allow her to visit her daughter. As Daisy Hay informs us in her book “Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives”, Claire Clairmont later conceived the paranoid notion that “Allegra had not died in 1822, but that Byron, in the spirit of absolut villainy, decided to convince Clara of her demise by sending a goat in a child’s coffin to England.”
But here’s why, according to research presented at the International Association of Byron Societies conference by Fernando Valverde, associate professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Virginia and former journalist for the Spanish “El Pais”, it is very likely that Allegra was not buried in Britain, but is buried in a chapel of the Italian convent.
A nun’s letter claimed Allegra was buried under an altar in the chapel, while the abbess suggested her body left for England but was lost at sea. This contradiction adds to the enduring mystery of Allegra’s burial.
Byron’s reflections on his daughter’s death, expressed in letters, reveal his grief and philosophical resignation. Allegra’s tragic fate, intertwined with the tumultuous lives of Byron, Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Claire Clairmont, continues to intrigue scholars and enthusiasts alike.
Source: amna.gr
