Far from a victim or an obstacle to Lord Byron’s work, Lady Byron was a rebel against the fashionable snobbery of her class, founding the first Infants School and Co-Operative School in England. A poet and a talented mathematician, Lady Byron supported the education of her precocious daughter, Ada Lovelace, now recognised as a pioneer of computer science and she saved from death her “adoptive daughter”, Medora Leigh, the child of Lord Byron’s incestuous affair with his sister. Lady Byron was adored by the younger abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe and by many notable friends. Yet her complex relationships with her family, including the sister Byron loved, runs like a live wire through this skillfully told, ground-breaking biography of a remarkable woman who made a life for herself and became a leading light in her century.