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A Quiet Adjustment

This is the second part of Markovits’s trilogy about Lord Byron. The novel, and the trilogy as a whole, explores the gap between who we think we are, and what the world thinks of us. In this novel Markovits, borrows and modernises from the forms and conventions of the 19th-century novel. A Quiet Adjustment is split into three volumes, and the plot follows the couple not only into marriage but through their separation. The novel serves as a kind of answer to the first book, Imposture – in which Byron’s doctor, Polidori, succumbs to the feelings of inferiority forced on him by ‘impossible comparisons’ to the poet. In A Quiet Adjustment, Byron’s wife is made to feel the same comparison, but she triumphs over Byron in the end, partly by taking over his relationship with his half-sister, Augusta. In this novel, Markovits continues to raise questions as to the purpose and form of historical fiction.