When We Two Parted

While “When We Two Parted” is ostensibly about Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster’s betrayal of George Gordon Byron’s love, it also reveals that Byron was a hypocrite regarding that love. Even though he was not faithful to Frances himself, Byron paints himself as the victim to her choosing the Duke of Wellington instead of waiting for him. Just a few years prior to the poem’s composition, Byron reportedly “spared” the married Frances from sexual consummation because “he believed her when she told him she would not be able to bear the guilt of a clandestine affair or, as Byron had proposed, of running away with him” (MacCarthy, Fiona. Byron: Life and Legend. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002). His discovery in 1815, through blistering social gossip, that Frances—still married to Webster—was having an affair with Wellington rankled him. He wrote his poem in a jealous fit but was self-aware enough to hide this by pretending to have written the poem in 1808 and excising its telling fifth stanza that revealed Frances’s name.

If Byron actually wanted to be with Frances, then the line from his excised stanza, that she had “prove[d] false unto many / As faithless to one” (See: Background), makes sense.