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the more she gave, the less he wanted her once the initial thrill was gone.
    Byron soon pulled back, wounding Caroline, who wanted him to admit that the relationship mattered to him. Her infatuation became obsessive. She begged to be invited to suppers where she knew he was going to be. If she wasn’t invited, she would wait in the garden. She made friends with his valet, in order to gain admittance to his rooms in St. James, where she rifled through his letters and journals. Hostesses began ridiculing her behind her back, as they smugly gossiped over tea.
    His friends advised him that his affair with Caroline was ruining his reputation. He removed himself to his country estate, where Caroline bombarded him with letters he didn’t answer. But Caroline persisted. She became that woman we all fear becoming, the crazy ex-girlfriend, unable to walk away with her dignity intact when it was clear that he was no longer interested. She sent him some of her pubic hair tinged with blood and dressed herself in a page costume to smuggle herself into his rooms. The campaign was so intense that Byron would refuse to attend social engagements for fear of meeting her. Byron’s passive-aggressive behavior didn’t help matters. He couldn’t—or wouldn’t—just end things. And William refused to play the outraged husband and demand she end the affair.
    Byron detested “scenes” unless he was the one making them and he finally found the intensity all too much. He eventually broke off the affair, but Caroline wouldn’t give up. She claimed that she and Byron intended to elope. Her father-in-law called her bluff, telling her, “Go and be damned! But I don’t think he’ll take you.” Caroline ran off, her family panicked, and her mother had a stroke. It was left to Byron to bring her back, but she would only go after William promised to forgive her. Her parents eventually whisked her off to Ireland, where Caroline tried to forget Byron and repair the damage to her marriage.
    While she was gone, Byron took up with Lady Oxford, an older woman with six children, who was also a friend of Caroline’s. Lady Oxford encouraged her lover’s disdain for Caroline, effectively ending their friendship. When Caroline wrote to Byron from Ireland, he would compose his replies to her with Lady Oxford’s help. As she was arriving back in London, she received a letter from Byron, sealed with Lady Oxford’s initials, that read: “I am no longer your lover; and since you oblige me to confess it, by this truly unfeminine persecution,—learn that I am attached to another; whose name it would be of course dishonorable to mention.”
    The shock made Caroline physically ill; she lost weight, and her behavior became increasingly erratic. During Christmas, she held a dramatic bonfire at Brocket Hall. While village girls danced in white, Caroline threw copies of Byron’s letters into the fire, while a figure of the poet was burned in effigy. She forged a letter from Byron to his publisher, John Murray, in order to take possession of a portrait of him that he had long refused her. She would visit at inappropriate hours, once leaving a note in one of his books on his desk: “Remember me!”
    At a party at Lady Heathcote’s, as they exchanged barbed remarks about dancing the waltz, suddenly Caroline took a knife and slashed her arms. Horrified guests tried to stop the bleeding; someone offered a glass of water. Caroline broke the glass and tried to gash her wrists with the slivers. Finally Byron felt the only way to truly end Caroline’s obsession was to tell her that not only had he slept with his half sister Augusta but that he’d also had affairs with men, hoping to turn her desire to disgust.
    The nineteenth-century term for what ailed Caroline was “erotomania,” dementia caused by obsession with a man. More likely Caroline was bipolar. Nowadays, she’d be given Prozac or lithium to balance out her moods, but back then the only treatment was