Byron: The Years of Fame

by Peter Quennell

A noted British critic here examines those aspects of Byron's life and thought which were peculiarly modern, set against the background of the Romantic movement.

THIS TITLE IS CITED AND RECOMMENDED BY: Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History

279 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1954

Reviews

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Within two years he had ruined her and the lands of Gight were sold; it was not long before he was obliged to fly the kingdom. Amid the mediocre dissipations of a French provincial town, where dram-drinking was his chief comfort and a buxom girl at the inn his last recorded mistress, he died broken and insolvent when his son was three.

The long arm of Lytton Strachey! Strachey introduced the lithe, comic, picturesque biography - but you could say Quennell perfected the form. Strachey had axes to grind - he saw Victorianism as a barbarous usurpation of the 18th century Francophone urbanity of Gibbon and Walpole - but in Quennell all is disinterested sparkle. Byron in Italy, the sequel to The Years of Fame, is even better - the masks of Venetian revels, the seduction of maids, intrigues with Italian nationalist spies and saboteurs (in Disgrace Coetzee has his narrator fondly nurse the idea of turning Byron in Italy into an opera).

[Vermillion · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am amazed that I managed to finish this book. Quennell has a knack for turning the most interesting and colourful life and career of Byron into an almost total snooze-fest. In fact, I literally did put the book down and sleep, many times. Quennell has an annoying habit of inserting a paragraph-long aside into an already paragraph-long sentence, so that by the time you come back to the original sentence, you've either forgotten what he's talking about or have ceased to care. I can't even blame the writing style on it being written in the 1930's, as I am used to reading literature of a much earlier date. There is some biographical information in here that may be of some use to the historian or scholar who may be more used to such dry tomes. But this is NOT a book to be read for pleasure. I am off in search of Byron biographies that actually entertain as well as inform and educate.