Extract from I NEVER KNEW THAT ABOUT ENGLAND, by Christopher Winn
Read the following passage and on lined paper, answer the questions.
ANNESLEY, Nottinghamshire
Lost Love
Hills of Annesley, bleak and barren
Where my thoughtless childhood strayed
How the Northern tempests, warring
Howl above thy tufted shade
Now no more, the hours beguiling,
Former favourite haunts I see,
Now no more my Mary smiling
Makes ye seem a heaven to me
ANNESLEY HALL, where the teenaged LORD BYRON loved and lost MARY CHAWORTH, his first and saddest passion, stands beside the ruins of a church, across the fields from the poet’s home at Newstead Abbey. In the park nearby, is DIADEM HILL, 578 ft (176 m) high, where they would meet and where they finally parted.
In one summer holiday, when he was 15, George Gordon, Lord Byron fell in love with the daughter of the house, Miss Mary Ann Chaworth. Unfortunately, she married someone else (John Musters) very soon afterwards.
Byron truly loved Mary, his ‘bright morning star of Annesley’, who was petite and exquisitely beautiful, but she did not return his feelings and he never recovered from her rejection. “Had I married Miss Chaworth, perhaps the whole tenor of my life would have been different,’ he wrote, and something of the aching sense of loss that runs through his poetry can still be felt here, where his melancholy and self-destruction began.
Lying in the ruined church is WILLIAM CHAWORTH, slain in a duel by Byron’s great uncle William, the ‘Wicked Lord’ from whom Byron inherited his title and the desolate Newstead Abbey.
Mary Chaworth died in 1832, when Annesley Hall was attacked by a mob rioting over the Great Reform Bill.
Answer the following questions in full sentences
- Who was Lord Byron’s first love?
- Where did they meet?
- What did Lord Byron think of her and how did he react to losing his love?
- What did Lord Byron say of his first love?
- How did Lord Byron react to the loss of his first love?
- What happened to William Chaworth?
- Byron’s Great uncle was known as what?
- What happened to Lord Byron’s first love in1832?