This biography read like a dark and twisted novel of intrigue, infidelity and incest. Half-sister of literary great Lord Byron, Augusta Leigh's story pulls the reader in like a siren's call to a sailor. I couldn't put it down until I'd finished it! ( )

This full-length biography of Augusta Leigh, half-sister and probable lover of the lord who was mad, bad and dangerous to know, is the first one to cover her life in almost forty years. The authors carried out a lot of original research, and clarified a lot of factual information about Leigh's life which was previously unknown. Yet the book shows us curiously little about Leigh, and less about why we would want to read a full length biography about her. She was, by all accounts, a perfectly ordinary woman, untouched by genius or even above average intelligence—her one claim to fame was her liaison with Byron, and as those events take up at least half the book, Leigh has to take a rather shadowy second place even in her own biography. ( )