Her Name on It

The wedding day arrives, and Charlotte Gordon lands the claim the whole series has been building toward. First she reads the morning's famous paragraph one perhaps at a time, a lesson in how not to swallow Victor. Then the room in Geneva: a teenager writing with a toddler at her knee, a notebook passed across the bed, two hands in two colors of ink. The Bodleian notebooks settle an old and insulting rumor for good, and Gordon says plainly what she thinks this novel has been all along. Byron may have had an inkling. Percy, she suspects, never saw it.