The question was, Was this falsehood to go on corrupting literature as long as history lasted?
Had the world no right to true history?
Had she who possessed the truth no responsibility to the world?
Was not a final silence a confirmation of a lie with all its consequences?
This testimony of Lady Byron, so far from being thrown out altogether, as the 'Quarterly' proposes, has a peculiar and specific value from the great forbearance and reticence which characterised the greater part of her life.
The testimony of a person who has shown in every action perfect friendliness to another comes with the more weight on that account.
Testimony extorted by conscience from a parent against a child, or a wife against a husband, where all the other actions of the life prove the existence of kind feeling, is held to be the strongest form of evidence.
The fact that Lady Byron, under the severest temptations and the bitterest insults and injuries, withheld every word by which Lord Byron could be criminated, so long as he and his sister were living, is strong evidence, that, when she did speak, it was not under the influence of ill- will, but of pure conscientious convictions; and the fullest weight ought, therefore, to be given to her testimony.
We are asked now why she ever spoke at all.

The fact that her story is known to several persons in England is brought up as if it were a crime.
To this we answer, Lady Byron had an undoubted moral right to have exposed the whole story in a public court in 1816, and thus cut herself loose from her husband by a divorce.

For the sake of saving her husband and sister from destruction, she waived this right to self-justification, and stood for years a silent sufferer under calumny and misrepresentation.

She desired nothing but to retire from the whole subject; to be permitted to enjoy with her child the peace and seclusion that belong to her sex.

Her husband made her, through his life and after his death, a subject of such constant discussion, that she must either abandon the current literature of her day, or run the risk of reading more or less about herself in almost every magazine of her time.
Conversations with Lord Byron, notes of interviews with Lord Byron, journals of time spent with Lord Byron, were constantly spread before the public.