Astarte: a Fragment of Truth
Selena Doyle to Lady Byron, 26 January 1816
“As a real wife you were contemned, but when you become again the beau idéal of his imagination, between the possession of which and
him there is an insuperable barrier, you will be a second Thersa [Thyrza], perhaps supplant her totally.
These are prophecies and may appear irrelevant, but as I think them now, I like to say them, they
may possibly save you a pang hereafter when you hear of his love and misery at being deprived of
you, which nothing can replace. No, nothing indeed, for were you to return the excitement pro-
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duced by desire of you would cease, I am convinced, and his incapacity of
rendering you happy, as you deserve in his opinion, would make him hate himself and you, and
hélas, as long as he lives I fear that his mind will
be in that disordered state without malady increases to a degree of imbecility, for I doubt not
that that degree of insanity is his natural state, at least since the period his mind was first
supposed to have been affected, and I have as little doubt that had he married Thersa, he would have been to Thersa what he has been to you. She could not better have ‘ministered to a mind
diseased’ than you did when living with him, than you do in leaving him.”1
