all Seville for abettors

When Donna Inez is first introduced in Canto I of Lord Byron’s Don Juan, editor Wu acknowledges the tendency to connect Byron’s poetic characters to real life. Of off the lines, “His mother was a learned lady famed/ For every branch of science known,” Wu footnotes, “Byron always denied that Donna Inez was supposed to be a caricature of his wife, but friends recognized the similarities, and advised him not to publish the poem in that account.” (DJ, lines 73-74)

When one is confronted with lines from Don Juan that echo lines from Fare Thee Well, a poem Byron wrote to his wife, Byron’s claim that Donna Inez is not based on his wife becomes hard to believe. In Fare Thee Well, Byron writes to his wife, “Then thou wouldst at last discover/ ‘Twas not well to spurn (my love) so./ Though the world for this commend thee.” (lines 11-13) This reference to an outer audience looking approvingly over his wife’s efforts to distance herself from her husband is what seems to be repeated in Don Juan. In stanza 28 of Don Juan, Byron writes, “She (Donna Inez) kept a journal where his (Don Jose’s) faults were noted/ And opened certain trunks of books and letters-/ All which might, if occasion served, be quoted;/.And then she had all Seville for abettors…” Like Bryon’s wife, Donna Inez has the support of outsiders as she works against her husband.

As was mentioned in class, it is hard, after having learned something of Lord Byron’s personal life and relationships, not to read Byron’s work with an eye searching for allusions to the poet’s turbulent life. Perhaps, therefore, with this biased eye in mind, this connection is a stretch; however, because this is a parallel drawn between not just a poem and an event in Byron’s life, but a narrative poem and a poem known to have been written from Byron to his wife, it seems to have some ground upon which to stand.