The mystery shrouding the fate of the body of Alegra Byron, daughter of Lord Byron and Claire Clermont, who died in an Italian convent at the age of five, is back in the news after the revelation of the monastery’s archive, as presented at the 48th International Byronic Conference in Mesolonghi.

The unfortunate Allegra died on 20 April 1822 of an undetermined epidemic, probably typhoid or malaria, at the nunnery of Baniakavalo near Ravenna.

The death and burial of little Allegra

Lord Byron had entrusted his daughter, the fruit of his troubled relationship with Claire Clermont, to the convent in order that she might receive a good upbringing and education, since the convent was run for financial reasons and as a boarding school. This choice proved unfortunate.

In a letter to his editor, John Murray, two days after Allegra’s death, the poet explained that it was his wish to send the remains of the girl to England to be buried in the cemetery of the Harrow School church (where she had attended) and “where I once wished mine to be found.”

The child’s body “is stuffed and in lead” he noted – while in the postscript to his letter, presumably to secure easier acceptance of his request, he added: “You know that for Protestants, burial in holy ground is not permitted in Catholic countries.”

The missing coffin – Her mother’s paranoid theory

According to the official narrative, the coffin containing Allegra’s body travelled to England, but the church’s vicar refused to allow the illegitimate daughter of a scandalous poet to be buried in the Christian cemetery. The girl was buried near the church, in an unknown place. No tombstone indicates where the body was deposited.

Allegra’s mother never stopped blaming Byron for his decision to send her daughter to the convent. The two had separated, their relationship was already almost hostile, and Byron stubbornly refused to allow her to visit her daughter.

As Daisy Hay informs us in her book Young Romantics, Claire Clermont later conceived the paranoid idea that “her daughter had not died in 1822, and that Byron, in an act of utter dishonesty, had decided to convince Claire of her loss by sending to England a goat in a child’s coffin.”

Banyakavalo Monastery: Mother Superior reports specific burial site of Allegra – Mystery intensifies

But here’s the thing, according to research presented at the International Union of Byronic Societies conference by Fernando Valverde, an associate professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Virginia and a former journalist for the Spanish El Pais, Allegra is most likely not buried in Britain, but is buried in an Italian monastery chapel.

The archives of the Banyacavalo monastery remained inaccessible, despite repeated attempts by the international bironic community to gain access to them. A few years ago the monastery ceased to function and its property passed to a Belgian company.

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In 2020, during the pandemic that had led to the temporary cessation of the evacuation of the buildings, Mr Valverde and his wife, Prof Nieves Garcia Prados, were able, through persistent fieldwork in the area, to gain access to the archive and photograph material from the period 1820-1822 relating to the unfortunate girl.

“Due to the epidemic that caused Allegra’s death, the Italian authorities would have been unable to have allowed a body to travel all the way to England,” Prof. Valverde believes. “Even in the case of Percy Shelley who drowned in the Adriatic, his body after being pulled from the water was taken to the stake. I see no reason why an exception should have been made in the case of Allegra.”

A nun of the Baniakavalo monastery indeed notes in a letter,that the girl never left the convent and that she is buried under an altar in the chapel of the Virgin of Lourdes. On the other hand, however, the abbess of the convent, in a letter to a professor at the boarding school, appears to state that Allegra’s body left Livorno for England and that the ship carrying her sank in the waters of the Adriatic. “The paradox in this case is that the site of the alleged shipwreck is close to where Shelley drowned,” notes F. Valverde.

Lord Byron’s troubled relationship with Claire Clermont

The revelation of the convent documents seems to extend the mystery already shrouding the death of little Allegra and is expected to spark a new round of debate in the field of Byronism – and beyond. Did Allegrina’s body travel all the way to England and where is it buried? If it never arrived, who should we believe? The abbess who seems to claim that the girl’s body was covered by the waters of the Adriatic, or the nun who also points to her grave. And if either woman is lying, who exactly is the logist?

Allegrina was the fruit of a troubled relationship that was mired in bitterness and hatred. Young people – Byron, Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire – experimented with ideals and choices – free love, shared parenting, liberalism and political radicalism – that brought them into conflict with the establishment of their time and even with themselves. In the midst of this conflict, they themselves came out wounded.

As Byron noted of his dead child in a letter to Sir Walter Scott on May 4, 1822, “my only comfort beyond time is the thought that she is either at rest or happy – for the few years (only five) of her life have protected her from falling into any sin outside that which we inherited from Adam.” And he concluded his report with a line from Shakespeare’s Muckbeth: “Whom the gods love, dies young.”

Perhaps the sisters of the Convent of St. John the Baptist, in the small village outside Ravenna, had the same thought. Perhaps they finally decided that the grassy place for the repose of an innocent, unfortunate, but dear to God creature was a crypt beneath their chapel.