Ashley Hay talks about The Secret

Why write a book about Byron?

If you want to start telling stories about someone you haven't made up, or who isn't yourself, then Byron is a great person to pick. Because any story that you want to tell — character as casanova, character as lusty bastard, character as god, character as hero, character as villain, character as person who wrote poetry sometimes, character as first modern celebrity, character as vampire, character as person who was kind to animals — you will be able to find wrapped around him. And I don't know whether it's because he is truly the most seductive man who ever lived, or because if you spend enough time inhabiting anyone's life you'll build up a fondness for them (or an obsession with them), but he's been an interesting person to carry around — you get animal stories and disastrous love stories and funny stories and potentially glorious stories and small emotive stories. All in one portable poet-sized parcel.

He sounds like quite a charmer but his wife didn't seem to think so — what was she like?

She was an earnest, quite religious woman who did lots of good, big things and probably should never have gone anywhere near Byron. He was someone who liked to shock people by saying outlandish things — and she was someone who took anything anyone said quite literally. She was an only child, used to getting her own way; she reacted quite vehemently to things but thought she was always completely in control. And when she took control of the marriage — and left it — she did something quite extraordinary for the times. But she never let Byron go: he was lodged at the centre of her, and she carried him with her for the rest of her very long life.

The story has a real dramatic flair that reads almost as fiction. Is any of it made up?

No. The dialogue and thoughts are taken from letters, diaries and journals — and from Lady Byron's enormous archive of writing which makes up the Lovelace Papers which are kept in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Obviously there are some gaps in the story which you bridge, drawing on what you know was happening and what you know the people were thinking — and there were so many suppositions and accusations being made by different people that you do sometimes have to choose one version over another. They were very generous in the amount they left behind them and the number of words they generated about each other and their marriage. I’m sure they probably made things about each other — neither partner in a disintegrating relationship tells the absolute truth about the other person or what was going on. But the shape of the story — what happened when, who did what, who said what — that's taken from the accounts that were left behind.

Why, as a new author, did you choose to write in the genre of non-fiction?

It's an interesting thing to take a story that already has a shape — a beginning, a middle and an end — and still be able to play with it creatively. Especially when the story that you're writing (all the different versions of who Byron was and what terrible things went on in his marriage) is about different ways of telling stories in the first place. It's probably the biography of a marriage — and no biography is ever entirely free from subjectivity, selection or even smoothing invention. It just goes by other names. Besides, writing non-fiction is also a very handy way of throwing people who look for autobiographical parallels in a first book off the scent ...

What are your two favourite pieces of information about Byron?

I love the fact that serious academic debate about this man reached the point of two people discussing whether he had really seen a hippopotamus or not — decades after he died. And that the vicar who snuck a look into his coffin in 1938 seemed entirely unperturbed by the fact that one of Byron's feet was detached from its leg. He generates the best anecdotes, the most bizarre facts and strange moments. Which is why he's been fun to play with.