Writer, landowner and minister
Edward Bulwer married Rosina Wheeler in 1827. Both became novelists, and their separation brought a bitter private dispute into public life. After his mother died in 1843 he inherited Knebworth and added Lytton to his surname. The Hertfordshire house he remodelled in the Gothic style remained a centre of family and literary life.
His parliamentary career overlapped with decades of novel-writing. He served as secretary of state for the colonies in 1858–59. In 1858, after Rosina publicly confronted him, she was confined for a time in a private asylum. Her own account and the correspondence surrounding the episode preserve a very different view of the household from the one a visitor might take away from Knebworth.
Imagining an underground society
The Coming Race appeared anonymously in 1871. Its American narrator descends a mine and finds a society whose command of vril seems to have solved the problem of labour. The same discovery leaves him almost helpless among his hosts. In Zanoni an artist encounters initiates who promise extraordinary powers, while A Strange Story gives a physician the uncomfortable task of explaining events beyond his experience. Lumitheca’s Zanoni is the first volume of a two-volume edition.
