Titans of History

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Austen’s novels may end happily, but not without revealing the situation of women of her class and era. Marriage determined a woman’s fate. As Charlotte Lucas’s marriage to the ridiculous Mr. Collins so eloquently demonstrates, almost any kind of marriage was deemed better than being an old maid. Elizabeth Bennet’s decision to challenge this convention is presented as admirable, but daring. Whereas we know that Elizabeth’s wit and charm will win her a husband (and a well-deserved place in the aristocracy), we also know that scores of women like Charlotte will not be so lucky and will have to compromise. Under a calm surface, Austen illuminates the prejudices, the scandals, the sheer misfortune and misunderstanding that could leave women without a husband, and in the absence of a personal fortune, dependent entirely on the kindness of others for survival. Austen also suggested, through the successful social elevation of both male and female characters by means of marriage, that a stagnant but often snobbish aristocracy was in need of new blood.

  The novelist who excelled in her treatment of love and marriage never herself married. She was, by all accounts, vivacious and attractive. The only surviving picture of her, a drawing done by her sister Cassandra, seems not to have done her justice. She had at least two semi-serious flirtations. At twenty-six she was briefly engaged to Harris Bigg-Withers, an heir five years her junior. Facing a lifetime with a man by all accounts as unfortunate as his name, Austen broke it off after less than a day. Rumors prevail of another, later attachment that was Austen’s true love. Her beloved sister Cassandra, who also remained unmarried, destroyed much of her correspondence after her death.

  Instead, Austen chose something her heroines never consider: a career. She had written since her childhood, producing stories, anecdotes and vignettes to amuse her family. In the upheaval after the family left her beloved childhood home, Austen stopped writing. Settling gratefully back in Hampshire with her mother and sister, Austen turned again to the works that she had begun a decade before. Elinor and Marianne became Sense and Sensibility (1811), and First Impressions became Pride and Prejudice. With the help of her brother Henry’s negotiating skills, Austen’s works were published under the authorship of simply “a lady,” with Northanger Abbey and Persuasion appearing posthumously in 1818. Famously private, Austen resisted attempts by the press and her proud family to make known the identity of this appealing writer, whose fans included the Prince Regent. Her authorship was made public only after her early death from, it is conjectured, Addison’s disease.

  In her short, uneventful life this extraordinary writer created works that resonate even more strongly today than they did in the early 19th century. The modern cult of Jane Austen continues apace, as fans try to discover more about the elusive novelist’s life, and Hollywood films attempt to weave romantic tales out of the sketchy biographical details that exist. Many would agree, however, that her novels suffice. Discreet, ironic, witty and compassionate, Austen’s masterful writing is the measure of the woman.

  SHAKA

  1787–1828

  It became known to us that Shaka had ordered that a man standing near us should be put to death for what crime we could not learn: but we soon found it to be one of the common occurrences in the course of the day.

  Recollections of a surgeon visiting Shaka in 1824

  Shaka was the founder of the Zulu empire and the creator of the Zulu nation but he was also a vicious, paranoid, vindictive, cruel and self-destructive tyrant.

  Shaka was raised with an absent father and a strong, devoted and wronged mother in an atmosphere of instability, violence and fear. His father, Senzangakona, was chief of the Zulu tribe, but, unusually, opted to marry a lower-class woman from the neighboring eLangeni clan. The marriage broke up when the young Shaka was six, and his mother took him back to the eLangeni; however, she was ostracized there because of her marriage. Not only did the future leader spend the rest of his youth without a father, he also had to deal with the social stigma that resulted from a marriage that brought disgrace upon his mother. Unable to cope, his mother went into exile, eventually finding a home with the Mtetwa clan in 1802.

  Shaka’s fortunes began to change when, at twenty-three—already tall, muscular and striking—he was called up to perform military service by Dingiswayo, a chief of the Mtetwa. As a warrior Shaka soon achieved a reputation for brilliance and bravery, and he helped the Mtetwa establish their dominance over many smaller clans, including the Zulus. He also witnessed, at first hand, Dingiswayo’s efforts to reform the organization and attitude of the armed forces—lessons he did not forget.

  In 1816 news arrived that Shaka’s father had died. Dingiswayo now released him from his service so that he might return and claim his birthright as Zulu chief. Although the Zulu were, at that time, one of the smaller clans on the east coast of southern Africa, Shaka had big plans for the future.

  On his return, he immediately crushed internal opposition to his rule. He then set about remodeling the Zulu into a warrior people. The army was re-equipped and reorganized, embracing the horned buffalo battle formation that would become its trademark. When deployed, the objective of this formation was always the same: the annihilation of the enemy’s troops.

  At a time when most battles were little more than skirmishes, with no real sense of strategic direction, Shaka’s disciplined and ruthless approach constituted a revolution in clan warfare. His armies quickly established a terrifying reputation, and Shaka began to use them to redraw the map of southern Africa.

  The first to feel his wrath were those clans closest to the Zulu along the eastern seaboard, including the eLangeni. Shaka brought down a terrible vengeance on those who had inflicted misery on his mother when he had been a boy, impaling the clan’s leaders on wooden stakes cut from their own fences.

  Other victories followed, and after each one Shaka incorporated the men of the vanquished clans into his own armies. Within a year he had quadrupled the size of the forces at his command. When in 1817 Dingiswayo—still Shaka’s nominal overlord—was murdered by a rival, Chief Zwinde of the Ndwandwe clan, the way was clear for untrammeled Zulu expansion.

  Thereafter, one clan after another was conquered and their lands devastated. Those who lay within Shaka’s path faced a stark choice: submit, flee or die. The major clans in the area, including the Ndwandwe, were overwhelmed, as were numerous smaller clans to the south of the Zulu. By 1823 Shaka had devastated much of southeastern Africa.

  It was not just those who came into immediate contact with Shaka and his forces who were affected. The flight inland of thousands who feared Shaka’s marauding armies tore up the established clan structure and social framework of the African interior. In the Mfecane (crushing) that followed, as many as 2 million people may have died as this internal “scramble for Africa” spiraled out of control.

  The worst was yet to come. In 1827 Shaka’s mother died, and the warrior-chief abandoned all sense of restraint. He was no longer concerned with establishing a huge Zulu empire, but instead sought to inflict the pain he himself felt at his mother’s death on as many others as possible. In the first phase of this public mourning process, some 7000 Zulus were slaughtered. Pregnant women were killed, along with their husbands, while even cattle were butchered by the agents of Shaka’s rage.

  Death and destruction now became the only phenomena that gave meaning to Shaka’s life, and he unleashed his armies to carry fire and slaughter far and wide. The violence only ended when Shaka was assassinated by his half-brothers Dingane and Mhlangana in 1828. A life that had promised so much ended in dishonor: stabbed to death with spears, the once great chief was buried without ceremony in a pit.

  At time of his death, Shaka governed over 250,000 people and could raise an army of 50,000. He had built a huge kingdom out of almost nothing, but the price paid by ordinary Africans was vast. Millions had died as a consequence of Shaka’s unbridled ambition. Prior to his death, Shaka had established friendly relations with the British, but not with the Afrikaners (Boers), and under his
half-brother successor, Dingane, the first armed clashes occurred with Boer settlers in Natal. After an initial victory, a Zulu force of several thousand suffered a decisive defeat at the hands of a much smaller contingent of Boers at the Battle of Blood River in December 1838—an event that triggered a Zulu civil war with Mpande—another of Shaka’s half-brothers—who formed an alliance with the Boers and succeeded in overthrowing Dingane. Over the following couple of years, much of the Zulu empire fell under Boer control, but Britain’s formal annexation of Natal in 1843 led to the restoration of these lands to the Zulus.

  Thereafter, until the second half of the 19th century, the British made no concerted effort to confront the Zulus. Indeed, government policy was to safeguard the integrity of the Zulu empire from Boer expansionism. All this changed, however, in January 1879 when, to placate the Akrikaners after the annexation of the Transvaal two years earlier, the British instigated the Zulu War, aiming to seize Zululand as an area ripe for Afrikaner settlement. They ordered the Zulu king Cetshwayo—Mpande’s son—to disband his army within thirty days; when he failed to comply, hostilities began.

  By September 1879, Cetshwayo had been captured and the territory brought under British control (though not before the British had suffered a famous defeat at the Battle of Isandhlwana and been pinned down at the siege of Rorke’s Drift—an incident forever commemorated in the 1964 film Zulu). Though unrest continued in the years that followed, prospects for an independent Zulu homeland had suffered fatal damage. In 1887, Zululand was formally annexed to the crown—a move that signaled the permanent dissolution of the Zulu empire.

  BYRON

  1788–1824

  A variety of powers almost boundless, and a pride no less vast in displaying them,—a susceptibility of new impressions and impulses, even beyond the usual allotment of genius, and an uncontrolled impetuosity in yielding to them …

  Byron, as described by his friend and biographer Thomas Moore in his Life of Lord Byron (1835)

  Lord Byron, the dashing, brooding poet, was the quintessence of the romantic hero. Women lost themselves trying to save him; society looked on in fascinated outrage as the aristocratic outsider defied their conventions. Shadowed by a permanent aura of depravity, irresistible in his vulnerability, mocking, witty, flamboyant and bold, Byron gave birth to a new image of the hero. Yet it is the incandescent, exuberant genius of the poetry that makes him immortal

  George Gordon, Lord Byron, was, as he wrote in his unfinished masterpiece Don Juan, “the Grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme.” The poet who could dash off sixty to eighty stanzas after a hearty dinner hit the English literary landscape like a hurricane. When the first two cantos of his Childe Harold were published in 1812, they sold out immediately. “I awoke one morning,” noted the twenty-year-old poet, “and found myself famous.”

  Byron was the poster boy of the Romantic generation. The melancholic disillusionment of Childe Harold and the mordant, mocking irony of Don Juan satirized the hypocrisies and pretensions of society and mourned the failure of reality to live up to lofty ideals. Driven forward in searing, pounding rhythms, Byron’s poetry embodied the spirit of the age:

  I live not in myself, but I become

  Portion of that around me; and to me,

  High mountains are a feeling, but the hum

  Of human cities torture

  Everyone assumed that Byron was the lost and disenchanted eponymous hero of Childe Harold, restlessly wandering across the continent. The poet’s history was indeed romantic enough. Son of the profligate, charming Captain John “Mad Jack” Byron, the boy was brought up in penury in Aberdeen by his widowed mother until the death of his great-uncle transformed his fortunes. Brought back to England, the wild, club-footed ten-year-old inherited the magnificent ruins of Newstead Abbey and the title of Lord Byron.

  Sitting in a corner, staring moodily into space, the slight, pale, beautiful Byron was a magnet for society’s women. “He is really the only topic almost of every conversation—the men jealous of him, the women of each other,” commented the political hostess Georgiana, duchess of Devonshire. With his innumerable conquests, Byron cut a swathe through society—from Lady Caroline Lamb, who was so mad about the poet that when he was attending a party to which she was not invited, she would wait outside in the street for him, to Lady Oxford, the middle-aged hostess who encouraged her young lover’s radicalism.

  “Mad, bad and dangerous to know,” as Lady Caroline Lamb famously described him, the poet had no qualms about scandalizing society. “It may be now and then voluptuous—I can’t help that” was Byron’s insouciant response to claims that Don Juan was a “eulogy of vice.” Byron, living (by his own admission) in “an abyss of sensuality,” was infamous for his aura of tortured depravity and for the drinking orgies held with his friends, garbed in monks’ habits, amid the Gothic ruins of Newstead Abbey. “There never existed a more worthless set,” was the verdict of the war hero the duke of Wellington.

  A domineering mother and a childhood of sexual abuse by his nurse May Gray had thwarted his capacity for relationships; he constantly thirsted for new sensations and new lovers, whether male or female. He fell passionately in love and became equally swiftly disillusioned. Augusta Leigh, whose own daughter was probably Byron’s, was the great love of his life, but she was also his half-sister. To all other women he could be monstrously cruel. He had an anguished relationship with his great friend Shelley’s sister-in-law, Claire Clairmont, whom he made pregnant and then rejected. The much-loved daughter of this affair Byron placed in an Italian convent, where she died at age five. Byron’s marriage to the humorless Annabella Milbanke was a disaster. It broke down irretrievably after less than a year amid talk of Byron’s marital violence, incestuous relationships and bisexuality—rumors so scandalous that they forced him in 1816 to leave England and the baby daughter of this marriage, Augusta Ada, never to return.

  In Venice Byron swam home at night along the Grand Canal, pushing a board with a candle on it to light his way. The man who had kept a bear in his rooms at Cambridge lived in a palazzo that was a veritable menagerie. Shelley once listed the members of the household: “ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, a falcon … [and] I have just met on the grand staircase five peacocks, two guinea hens and an Egyptian crane.”

  Visitors flocked to see the poet. Some found him grown fat and gray, but his vigor was restored by a passionate affair with a radical young Italian countess. Restless once again, Byron launched himself into yet another campaign: the fight for Greek independence from the Turks. He poured his money and his soul into the project. But at Missolonghi in Greece, weakened by a life of dissipation and excess, Byron caught a fever and died. Such was the end, at the age of just thirty-six, of the poet whose magnificent defiance of petty convention had outraged and enraptured Europe for a generation.

  BALZAC

  1799–1850

  I find people very impertinent when they say I am deep and then try to get to know me in five minutes. Between you and me, I am not deep but very wide, and it takes time to walk around me.

  Balzac, in a letter to Countess Maffei (1837)

  Honoré de Balzac was one of the most prolific of literary giants. His masterpiece, La Comédie humaine, is made up of nearly 100 works which contain more than 2000 characters and together create an alternative reality that extends from Paris to the provincial backwaters of France. Balzac’s works transformed the novel into a great art form capable of representing life in all its detail and color, so paving the way for the ambitious works of writers such as Proust and Zola. Balzac, the plump, amiable, workaholic genius, was in many respects the father of the modern novel.

  As the unremarkable child of a beautiful but unpleasant mother and a self-indulgent father, Balzac did not seem marked for greatness. After school he worked as a legal clerk, but this did not excite a young man with grand ambition but little direction in which to channel it, and around the age of nineteen he decide
d to become a writer. He went to Paris, determined to adopt a lifestyle appropriate to his new calling. He ran up great debts cultivating the image of a literary man about town, frequently dodging his creditors and flirting with bankruptcy.

  One important thing was lacking: success. Balzac’s first work, Cromwell, a verse tragedy about the leader of the English Commonwealth, was a failure that made his family despair. By 1822 he had written several more, equally unsuccessful, works. His output throughout the 1820s consisted of slushy or sensational potboilers and historical romances in the style of Sir Walter Scott. Some were published under pseudonyms, others under no name at all. None gave any indication that Balzac was about to become a literary titan.

  But around 1830 Balzac began to form a new and revolutionary concept of fiction. A few writers had toyed with the idea of placing characters across more than one book, but no one had applied the idea to their life’s work. Balzac leapt at the concept, realizing that he could create a self-contained world that stretched across all his novels. When the idea came to him, he is said to have run all the way to his sister Laure’s house on the right bank of the Seine, shouting, “Hats off! I am about to become a genius!”

  With a focus for his efforts, Balzac swiftly began to produce work of real significance. He was a phenomenally energetic writer, routinely working for eighteen hours at a stretch, fueled by up to fifty cups of coffee a day. He described himself as a “galley slave of pen and ink”; others called him a Napoleon of letters. One story, The Illustrious Gaudissart, was produced in a single sitting—14,000 words in a night. He was a furious amender of proofs from his publishers, revising and reworking his stories through six or seven drafts.