Byron

by Fiona MacCarthy

Fiona MacCarthy makes a breakthrough in interpreting Byron's life and poetry drawing on John Murray's world-famous archive.

She brings a fresh eye to his early years: his childhood in Scotland, embattled relations with his mother, the effect of his deformed foot on his development. She traces his early travels in the Mediterranean and the East, throwing light on his relationships with adolescent boys - a hidden subject in earlier biographies. While paying due attention to the compelling tragicomedy of Byron's marriage, his incestuous love for his half-sister Augusta and the clamorous attention of his female fans, she gives a new importance to his close male friendships, in particular that with his publisher John Murray. She tells the full story of their famous disagreement, ending as a rift between them as Byron's poetry became more recklessly controversial.

Byron was a celebrity in his own lifetime, becoming a 'superstar' in 1812, after the publication of Childe Harold. The Byron legend grew to unprecedented proportions after his death in the Greek War of Independence at the age of thirty-six.
The problem for a biographer is sifting the truth from the sentimental, the self-serving and the spurious. Fiona MacCarthy has overcome this to produce an immaculately researched biography, which is also her refreshing personal view.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, Poetry, Romanticism, 19th Century, Literature

720 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Fiona MacCarthy (January 23, 1940 - February 29, 2020) was an English biographer and cultural historian best known for her studies of 19th- and 20th-Century art and design.

MacCarthy began her career on The Guardian in 1963 initially as an assistant to the women's editor Mary Stott. She was appointed as the newspaper's design correspondent, working as a features writer and columnist, sometimes using a pseudonymous byline to avoid two articles appearing in the same issue. She left The Guardian in 1969, briefly becoming women's editor of the London Evening Standard before settling in Sheffield.

She later became a biographer and critic. She came to wider attention as a biographer with a once-controversial study of the Roman Catholic craftsman and sculptor Eric Gill, first published in 1989. MacCarthy is known for her arts essays and reviews, which appeared in The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and The New York Review of Books. She contributed to TV and radio arts programmes.

Reviews

[Elaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

He had a deformed foot and wasn't a nice man

[Julie Bozza · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent biography of Byron - and I've read a few by now. To be honest, during Byron's early years I was feeling as if I'd read it all (or most of it) before. But during the later years, especially once he reaches Venice, the book really came into its own. I felt there was more depth, detail and interest than I'd found before.

The time Byron spent in Cephalonia and Missolonghi in Greece were dealt with particularly thoroughly, for which I was grateful. It's almost as if other biographies rush through to the end at that point, as if it were all a fait accompli. MacCarthy shows that it was not, and that Byron was in some ways at his most engaged and thoughtful during those last months; patient and considerate, with only a few small incidents as exceptions.

One of my pet frustrations is when biographies basically stop at the first possible moment: '...and so he died. The End.' But a person's life doesn't end with them, not even for 'ordinary' folks. I want to know more about what happens to those around them; what happened to their children and grandchildren; how their work and influence continued on through the ages. So I was very pleased to find that there was still over 50 pages to go even once Byron's own end had been reached. I was only half satisfied, though.

A detailed chapter included the story of how Byron's remains were dealt with, being shipped from Greece back to England, and eventually buried in his family vault. Another two chapters discussed his influence on European writers and artists, and on Englishmen. Which was all of great interest. But the ongoing tales of his daughter, other family members, and his loyal servants (some of whom were with him throughout much of this book's story) were barely mentioned in passing if at all. So I was very well answered in one way, but hardly at all in another.

Still! I think there is rarely one definitive biography of a person, as each one can add to the whole picture painted. MacCarthy's work is certainly one of the key texts, and adds immensely to my sense of who this fascinating man might have been.

[Esther ✨ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm even entirely sure how to go about reviewing a biography since this is the first biography of its kind that I've read.

All I can say is that I'm glad I chose Byron.

Whilst reading this book and carrying around with me, so many people commented on how tiny the writing is and how dense the text is and wasn't I bored yet? The answer, always, was no. How, when reading about Byron's life, could anyone be bored? I read it over a period of months and couldn't help myself from coming back to it between reading other books. The writing style is addictive, the detail almost personal.

The most amazing thing about Byron is perhaps that while alive he gave those around him a sense of awe and a feeling of connection to him, even if he felt no connection himself. People wanted to know him and actually felt like they did. In his death, he still manages to achieve this. When reading his work or information about him, Byron comes across so vividly that you can almost see him there, lounging in the shade of a tree in Italy. MacCarthy brings him back to life with her abundance of resources, journals and accounts from the people who came across Byron in their lifetimes. One thing is for sure, those who met Byron were not quick to forget him.

Complex and sensitive, yet unpredictable and sometimes cruel, it seems that nobody really ever knew the poet. Maybe Teresa, Hobhouse, Lady Melbourne, and Augusta came close. The stories retold by MacCarthy only further prove how far Byron's friends went after his death to preserve what was left of his reputation and to stop further damaging journals from being published. Even now, things such as Byron's wikipedia page is only the tip of the iceberg of who he really was. When I visited Newstead Abbey recently, I was told by the tour guide that Nottingham City Council has them emit details from the tour that are too graphic concerning his bisexuality, his abundance of lovers across Europe, substance abuse, and his incestuous relationship with Augusta. Even now, in 2014, Byron's life is simply seen as too taboo, and I can only imagine how it was viewed when he was alive. When people describe him as the first rockstar type celebrity ever, they're not wrong.

When reading about Byron it's easy to forget that he was a real man, who lived and breathed in the same world. He comes across like a fictional character, and maybe that's because his legacy goes on in the Byronic Hero. It amazes me how one man could leave such an impact in his short life. And while it might've been a short life, it was definitely well-lived. The reaction to his death, particularly amongst those who knew him best, proves this perfectly. Especially touching were Hobhouse and Fletcher's reactions, which were poignant and sad. The people of England, who had been quick to shun him, welcomed him back in death, with people flooding to buy tickets to view his body, and people leaning out of windows to watch his funeral procession. It shows that the line between hero and villain can be very, very thin, and Byron was always walking the line.

There was so much that I didn't know about Byron before reading Life and Legend, and it has only fuelled my fascination (and obsession, let's be honest.) Even with such vivid images of Byron portrayed, he's still an enigma to us today. He was problematic and flawed and uncaring, yet often comes across so likeable and witty, sometimes childish, but always thinking. He was the result of everything he had endured, and if the blood-letting hadn't quickened his death, the constant stress might've done. Reading about his death, it feels as though someone like him was meant for the hero's death, as the Greeks treated it. While it would've been brilliant to read more of Don Juan and to read about him dying somewhere warm, content for once in his life, it seems fitting that he died in the midst of trying to do something he thought was right.

It will be hard to find another biography to read next, because who could ever compare? I never thought I'd reread a biography, but I know I'll come back to Life and Legend again someday. I mean, after referring to it as the Byron Bible a few times when telling people about it, how could I not come back to it?

[Jesús De la Jara · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Me abriré camino en el mundo o pereceré en el intento. Otros han iniciado la vida sin nada y han terminado con grandeza. Y yo, que poseo una fortuna aceptable si no grande, ¿he de permanecer ocioso? No, me forjaré el camino a la grandeza, mas nunca con deshonor."

Es difícil puntuar un libro como este, pues como no me ha llegado a fascinar entonces uno empieza a ver qué puntos son buenos y malos. Y es que a veces uno espera algo de una biografía pero la autora puede que se vaya por otro enfoque o resaltando eventos que para ella le parecen más interesantes o importantes. Algo así me pasó con este libro.
Esta biografía tiene muchísimas fuentes en los propios diarios que Byron escribió a lo largo de la vida y muchos otros documentos de interés. Nos narra la historia de este gran escritor quien desde muy pequeño tenía una relación conflictiva con su madre a la cual quería pero también maltrataba y no mostraba el respeto debido a ella. Luego de enviudar su madre viajó por diferentes lugares e inclusos países.
Entró a realizar estudios en Cambridge, donde es famoso por su conducta extravagante como conseguirse un oso que guardaba en el lugar. Se burlaba de la universidad diciendo que el oso aspiraba a un puesto universitario. Aquí se llegó a destacar entre sus compañeros de gran manera e hizo grandes amistades como John Hobhouse. Desde muy temprano refiere la autora que Byron guardó relaciones homosexuales y aquí no fue la excepción.
En Londres vive entre hoteles porque se siente con más libertad. Tuvo ahí muchas damas de compañía y se cuenta que realizó orgías de hasta 10 mujeres. Gracias a su título de Lord tuvo alguna labor política que nunca le cuajó bien. Pero dio algunos discursos en la Gran Cámara de los lores.
Las continuas relaciones con hombres y mujeres son ahondadas en este libro por lo que, por momentos, la cantidad de espacio y fuentes para describir cosas que quizás se podrían haber abreviado me parecieron un poco negativas. Una de esas relaciones, pero sí realmente imporante, fue la que tuvo con Caroline Lamb. Ella estuvo realmente muy loca por él hasta intento fugarse y escapó de su familia. Byron al final ayudó a que vuelva con su esposo y le escribió una carta conmovedora. De ella viene la frase que dijo de Byron que era loco, malo y peligroso de conocer.
Era de alguna manera un devorador ya que usaba a las mujeres jóvenes y le molestaba cuando luego le escribía interminables cartas. Había tenido demasiadas amantes y quizás ya le daba tedio esas cosas.
Caroline lo costaba mucho incluso iba a su residencia y se colaba con traje de hombre para llegar hasta sus aposentos hasta que Byron le enseñó algunas cosas cartas probablemente sobre su homosexualidad o sobre su relación con su hermana Augusta. Augusta era una hermanastra de Byron con la que llegó a tener una relación muy especial, él la amaba sin lugar a dudas, pero por el escándalo siempre cuidó que ella no saliera perjudicada. Probablemente su hermanastra también compartía dicho sentimiento.
En parte por huir de Caroline, quien nunca dejó de perseguirlo prácticamente, decidió casarse con Annabella Milbanke quien era una mujer inteligente, afable, de alta cuna y muy tranquila. Lamentablemente, el matrimonio no fue bien y además dio a Annabella la sospecha del amor de Byron por su hermanastra; se dio cuenta del entusiasmo de él cada vez que recibía una carta de Augusta y de su cólera y su terror cuando ella le contó la historia de una unión incestuosa entre una hermana y un hermano que no sabían que estaban emparentados. Su esposa en vista de su actitud loca con su hija decide abandonar a Byron. El también estaba a favor de ello. Finalmente se lleva a su hija. Todo ello conllevó un proceso legal, gracias a lo cual surgieron muchos rumores y se habló de manera más abierta de la sodomía de Byron y sobre todo del incesto con su hermana
Al final Anabella se retractó de las dos grandes acusaciones.


"Tiene un semblante pálido y enfermizo, aunque es apuesto, tiene mal tipo, pero es de conversación animada y entretenida, y, en resumen, realmente es casi el único tema de todas las conversaciones; los hombres sienten celos de él y las mujeres lo sienten unas de otras."

Luego de este suceso Byron prosigue su viaje fuera de Inglaterra del cual ya no volvería. Viaja a Suiza, Venecia y finalmente a Grecia. Es ahí donde se reúne con los Shelley (Percy, Mary y Claire). Hace gran amistad con Percy y Mary pero no quiere unirse a Claire a quien había dejado embarazada. Byron cuida mucho de Allegra, su hija, a pesar de todo y no quería enviar a su hija a donde Claire puesto que pensaba que los Shelley no sabían cuidar a sus hijos pues le daban alimentación vegana y podría morir. Al final, su hija Allegra murió en el convento de una infección. Él no la veía desde hace un año y no fue a verla nunca a pesar que ella le pidió varias veces.
En otras ocasiones, también Byron se portó mal. Cuando su amigo Hubhouse fue encarcelado por escribir un panfleto revolucionario Byron le dedicó un poema satírico desde entonces ya no sería tan amigos a pesar de que Byron pareció disculparse. Luego, su editor, Murray rompió con Byron porque él eligió a John Hunt como su editor.
Byron permaneció mucho tiempo en Italia donde se unió a los revolucionarios Carbonari. Allí conoció a una de las mujeres más importantes para él, Teresa Guicccioli, quien lo acompañó mucho y tuvieron una relación muy especial. Estuvo ligado a ella durante los cuatro años siguientes. Es lo más cerca que había estado Byron de formar un matrimonio feliz. Luego tuvo que dejarla para luchar por la independencia de Grecia. Durante su viaje a Grecia, aparentemente también se enamoró en este caso de su amigo Lukas, joven griego que adoptó y parece que no le correspondía y eso le hizo sufrir. Byron dijo, al final, también que le había dado su tiempo dinero, salud a Grecia y ahora su vida. Byron falleció en Mesolongi probablemente de una infección por garrapata.
Creo que a veces el libro exagera en detalles al comentar la vestimenta del chofer el conductor del carruaje que no tiene ninguna importancia o del tipo específico de medicina que tomó el doctor Polidori. Pero sí da detalles abundantes sobre su biografía y cierra con la influencia que tuvo a nivel mundial.

"Yo creo... que todo ese ruido que se hace alrededor de la escritura y los que escriben, por parte de estos y de otros, es un mero signo de afeminamiento, de degeneración y de debilidad. ¿Quién querría escribir si tuviera algo mejor que hacer?"

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Undoubtedly the best biography of Byron available. MacCarthy's research is both deep and wide, and she addresses even the stickiest or most speculative parts of Byron's life with candor and a healthy dose of skepticism. It's a great read, and very informative.

[Charles Matthews · Rating 3 out of 5]

This review originally ran in the San Jose Mercury News on December 22, 2002:

George Gordon, Lord Byron, was the first modern celebrity, the original dude with attitude, a prince of 'tudes. He crafted and relished the reputation that was summed up in the journal of one of his mistresses, Lady Caroline Lamb, who called him ''mad -- bad -- and dangerous to know'' (adjectives that many would have applied to Lady Caroline herself).
Fiona MacCarthy's very readable new biography tries to sort out the real Lord Byron from the complexities, of which there were plenty. He was an English aristocrat whose hero was Napoleon and whose politics were radical -- he joined the revolutionary Carbonari in Italy, and when he died in 1824 (from an infection worsened by the common medical practice of bleeding the patient) he was leading an attempt to liberate Greece from Turkey.

In the view of some contemporaries he was an effeminate dandy. In his portraits, many of which are handsomely reproduced in the book, he's costumed, primped and petulant. When he grew fat from self-indulgence he would crash-diet himself into thinness. He had a deformed foot that he took efforts to conceal, yet he was celebrated for such feats of physical vigor as swimming the Hellespont.
He was a womanizer who claimed to have made around 200 conquests during his two-year stay in Venice, but in his letters he expressed revulsion at femalephysicality (he particularly disliked watching women eat), and may have had what MacCarthy calls an ''innate sexual orientation toward boys.''
In her attempt to get behind the image and see what drove Byron to create and perpetuate it, MacCarthy, like most modern biographers, zeroes in on sex. Much of Byron's behavior stems, she suggests, from sexual ambivalence. There's ample evidence that as a student at Harrow and Cambridge, and on youthful travels in Greece and Turkey, Byron had numerous homosexual liaisons.
Byron's homosexuality, MacCarthy asserts, reinforced his sense of himself as outsider, especially since sodomy was a capital crime in the England of his day. ''England labeled as degenerate the instincts Byron experienced as natural,'' MacCarthy says, and provided the genesis of Byron's ''feeling of belonging to no country.'' His love of Greece, she asserts, began ''because homosexual relations in the East had none of the stigma they bore in his own country.''
Awareness of the risks to his reputation -- and, considering the English law, his life -- may have entered into Byron's image-making as well, MacCarthy suggests. Byron hung his early sexuality in the closet, setting out on ''frenetic'' relationships with women that, MacCarthy asserts, had ''an element of cruelty engendered by the knowledge that he was being false to his own heart.'' The result was that he adopted the manner we see as ''quintessentially Byronic . . . the bravura self-mockery of someone forced to recognise his outlaw state.''
MacCarthy portrays a Byron who was more sinned against -- by a narrow-minded society -- than sinning. Certainly we shouldn't be shocked that Byron was gay. But the evidence of his pedophilia is disturbing, as is the emotional brutality toward women that marks his countless heterosexual liaisons, including the one with his half-sister, Augusta. He was driven permanently into exile by the rumors about this incestuous relationship and the whispered allegations of sodomy that arose when Byron and his wife, Annabella, separated in 1816.
On the other hand, the scandal may have inaugurated the modern truism that there's no such thing as bad publicity. When he died, eight years after being exiled from England, the Times of London called him ''the most remarkable Englishman of his generation.'' In the two-chapter coda to her biography -- the ''legend'' part of the book -- MacCarthy points out that the image of the Byronic hero was so potent that even such eminent Victorians as Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin were able to overlook what they surely would have regarded as serious sexual misconduct in a contemporary. And when Emily Bronte wrote ''Wuthering Heights,'' she introduced ''Byronic hints of incest in the love between Heathcliff and Catherine.''
By their day, the story of Byron's life had been sanitized by his early biographer, Thomas Moore. And it helped that the Byronic hero was ''dashingly heterosexual,'' as MacCarthy puts it. The heroes of his poems -- Childe Harold, Manfred, Cain -- are wanderers and outcasts, or else they're scamps like Don Juan. Readers responded to ''Byron's poetic concept of himself as a man grandly and fatally flawed, who had lived so intensely and sinned so outrageously that he, and he alone, was doomed to suffer the retribution of the gods.''
The image may have been a more significant creation than anything Byron wrote. The long poems that made him famous -- ''Childe Harold's Pilgrimage,'' ''The Giaour,'' ''The Corsair'' and the like -- are tedious reading today. And as pleasant as some of Byron's lyrics are, they don't stand up against the work of his great contemporaries. They lack the imagery and depth of the odes of Keats and Shelley, the haunting magic of Coleridge's ''Kubla Khan'' and ''The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,'' and the penetrating insight of Wordsworth's best poetry. Byron also left no significant critical prose that compares with Keats' letters, Shelley's ''Defence of Poetry,'' Coleridge's lectures on Shakespeare or Wordsworth's ''Preface to 'Lyrical Ballads.' ''
It may simply be that poetry came so easily to Byron that he didn't take it seriously. MacCarthy asserts that in his youth, Byron saw ''the writing of poetry less as a serious professional occupation than as a diversion, a knack, a self-indulgence. In the scale of human achievement, as he viewed it at this time, rhyming did not count.''
There's not much evidence that this attitude ever fundamentally changed. His most enduring work is his comic masterpiece, ''Don Juan,'' on which he worked on almost until his death (it was left unfinished). The poem's lasting charm lies in the casualness with which Byron handles the intricacies of ottava rima, coming up with rhymes like ''Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual, / Inform us truly, have they not hen-peck'd you all?'' Byron's wordplay evokes the song lyrics of Lorenz Hart and Ira Gershwin more than it does the verses of Shelley and Wordsworth.
MacCarthy is undaunted by the enormous amounts of information available on Byron's life -- everyone who knew him seems to have kept diaries, journals and boxes full of letters. She has produced a huge but enticing book that takes its subject seriously -- perhaps too seriously. I wish she had found a way to lighten the gloom of her exploration of the darker side of Byron. His letters are buoyant with humor, and his comic and satiric poems -- which, in addition to ''Don Juan,'' include ''Beppo'' and ''English Bards and Scotch Reviewers'' -- retain a freshness that his ''serious'' work lacks.
The book could also have used more critical edge -- she discusses the poems hardly at all, and makes no effort to assess their comparative merits or to view Byron's work in the context of the great contemporary literary ferment of English Romanticism. But given the turmoil of Byron's life, both public and private, it's perhaps both necessary and revealing that his literary career fades into the background.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Byron is one of those historical figures about which I've never really known very much, outside of stereotype and caricature. Indeed, I've always thought I knew Byron better through the literary characters inspired by him (the classic Byronic hero) than the man himself. And the one thing that most impressed itself upon me on reading this book is...Byron didn't seem very Byronic at all. We all known the Byronic mode - brooding, rugged, magnetic, arrogant, mysterious. Mr Rochester. Heathcliff. And on reading this book, Byron himself didn't seem very much like the stereotype. Or perhaps more appropriately, he was all these things but that wasn't all he was. To be honest, I came away with a view of Byron more akin to Oscar Wilde than Heathcliff. And that's a big difference.

This is an excellent biography, one of the best I've ever read. MacCarthy is under no illusions as to Byron's flaws and she doesn't gloss over anything. Especially not the sex. Particularly not the sex. And good Lord, there was a lot of sex. This could almost be subtitled 'A Sexual Biography' for the amount of focus on Byron's conquests. And the man had a few - male and female, young and old. No wonder he died relatively young!

The one aspect that the author didn't focus on, and it's one area I really felt the lack, was any kind of explanation of why Byron inspired the hype that he did. He was an incredibly polarising figure, perhaps one of the first almost 'modern' celebrities, but I never got a clear sense of just what it was about Byron that made him the focus of such hysterical attention. He was young, he was handsome, he was charismatic and arrogant and fashionable, but so were many other 'dandies' - was it the combination of all that with his contempt for his society and willingness to play the exile? It would have been nice to have more an analysis of this.

But that's a minor flaw. This is a magisterial work, probably the definitive biography on Byron - erudite, engaging, readable, comprehensive. It would be hard to find a better read.

[Brian Willis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since Leslie Marchand's monumental biography, the true secrets of Byron's life have been slowly revealed. It's as if his memoirs weren't burned. Except...

We'll never know some aspects for sure. However, I think the biographers are getting it right. The only problem is MacCarthy's biography comes just before queer theory really permeated academia. This is not to take anything away from this book; with Marchand and the recent Eisler bio (another superb choice if you are interested), they get the details fully fleshed out (no pun intended), but still refer to Byron's same sex liaisons as "homosexual". Byron was a bisexual undoubtedly; probably, he was pansexual in modern parlance. Heck, at times he appears transgender, or at least had a penchant for "drag", or crossing gender lines in public appearance. MacCarthy's only two criticisms from me are: clumsy handling of the non-heteronormative aspects of Byron, and not nearly enough explication of the poetry.

Nonetheless, I was compulsively reading this book despite its tiny print (it surely most be 7-8 pt font), because of the sheer depth of detail. I felt I was THERE, though maybe not in Byron's head (who could?). If you want to know the nitty gritty, it's all here and you can even draw other conclusions. Hard to think of another with such detail.

[K · Rating 5 out of 5]

With the proviso that everyone sees in Byron whatever they want to see, my lasting impression—and what I loved—was not the widely disseminated image of a man of action, but a man of inaction. This was no poet-general. I rarely caught a glimpse of the numinous traveller who left behind a cult in every place he visited. And as much as I wanted to come face to face with someone who, as Anthony Lane puts it, was “forever making things happen or having them happen to him,” he never arrived at the appointed hour.

Instead, I found someone far more familiar, saddled with inertia and whipped with anxieties about the years flying past. Someone vulnerable to distraction, to bouts of shyness, to fleeing from necessary conversations and the abundance of regret this later produces. Someone desperate to find something to do, something that feels grand and weighty, yet which time and again they prove themselves ill-equipped to follow through. (Despite claims that Byron died in the Greek War of Independence, it would be more accurate to say that he died during it. Specifically, he died of tick fever in a large manor set far back from the meagre shorefront battlements of Missolonghi, where he spent his last months writing cheques, throwaway poetry, and plans for incursions he never saw nor had the experience to execute. Instead, he rode horses and swam and pined after his pageboy.)

Yet at the centre of this hurricane of poor decisions, you find at its stillest point someone who most longs for feeling. More than words, it was feeling which he successfully managed to pack into a short, confused life. Perhaps this wasn’t his intention—his dismal time-maths certainly hints at this, according to a journal entry sadly absent from this book:

“When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation), sleep, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning—how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse.”

But the dormouse felt. Does it matter what the feeling was? That it was the awe of a dawn that “gleams over the Grand Canal, and unshadows the Rialto” after a night with nothing else to show for it? That it was the yearning for friends who died while joining you in living destructively? That it wasn’t the privilege of knowing a genius daughter, but the warmth of strangers? (He died in a land of them, as his companion reported from Greece, “but no one was ever more loved nor wept by strangers.”)

I’m not sure it does.

[Yooperprof · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hadn't been aware that Byron was so. . . queer.

MacCarthy really brings out the same-sex sexuality that was always present in Byron's life and loves. It's not a coincidence that he has had a talisman for so many gay/queer Anglophone writers, from Oscar Wilde and Harold Nicolson to W.H. Auden and James Lees-Milne.

[Dr G · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was disappointed with this. Something called the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, in its website states about the author that “A well-known broadcaster and critic, Fiona MacCarthy established herself as one of the leading writers of biography in Britain with her widely acclaimed book Eric Gill , published in 1989. Her biography of Byron was described by A.N. Wilson as 'a flawless triumph' and William Morris won the Wolfson History Prize and the Writers' Guild Non-Fiction Award. She most recently published Last Curtsey , a memoir of her early life as a debutante. Fiona is a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Hon. Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She was awarded the OBE for services to literature in 2009.”
So this work promised much. In my view, it delivered much less.
Another biography of Byron to which I have previously referred has been The Making of the Poets Byron and Shelley in Their Time by Ian Gilmour, published in 2002. It is entertainingly written, comprehensive, based on primary sources and very fair in its judgments. MacCarthy’s work has little new to offer in the period covered by Gilmour. She does, however, gravitate towards the salacious. Gilmour argued that Byron’s departure from Britain in 1816 seemed unlikely to have been primarily the result of accusations of sexual transgressions: “if it had been so, he would have left much more abruptly, and would not have engaged in casual homosexual affairs in Falmouth on his way, as he did.” The difference in tone between the two books is evident in MacCarthy’s comment on the same matter: “His secretly acknowledged history of sodomy, a crime then punishable by execution, provides the only convincing reason for his exile in 1816, as rumours surrounding Byron’s separation from his wife, at first concentrated on suspicions of incest, broadened to include accusations of sodomy as well.”
MacCarthy writes in her Introduction, “in working on this re-assessment of Lord Byron, I have been fortunate in having access to new material from the Murray archive. This is the complete run of correspondence from John Murray to Byron…Only isolated letters have been available before.”
The relationship between Byron and Murray, his publisher, was hardly intimate, with the latter frequently inciting Byron’s irritation as he tried to quell the writer’s more lurid writing so as not to offend bourgeois potential buyers’ sensibilities. Consequently, I am sceptical about how valuable the archive would have been. And when we are informed that “Byron was in Rome for three weeks. New evidence in the Murray archive has confirmed that he stayed in rooms at 66 Piazza di Spagna” I question whether the breathless excitement is justified.
This is not to say that MacCarthy’s book is a waste of reading time, although much of its value lies in its treatment of the post-2012 period.
There is certainly some useful material on Byron’s early life, though. I was interested in MacCarthy’s comments on his years in Calvinist Aberdeen. “All through his childhood, he was exposed to what he recollected as a particularly virulent strain of Aberdonian Scottish Calvinism, being ‘cudgelled to Church’ for his first ten years, and being indoctrinated by his tutors and schoolmasters with a sense of his own innate transgressions. With its emphasis on predestination, Calvinism nurtured Byron’s characteristic pessimism, the fatalistic dramas that attached to the no-hopers. Lady Byron, not unconvincingly, blamed his early absorption of ‘the gloomiest Calvinistic tenets’ for much of the misery of Byron’s life.”
The Byron family had been rewarded by both William the Conqueror and Charles I, and they bought Newstead Abbey during the Dissolution. Byron’s paternal grandfather sold off much of the contents of the Abbey and neglected the buildings, and his father did little to recover the situation so George inherited little of value. While George had little time in the Abbey, it is present in his writing. MacCarthy notes that “Byron has often been accused of having no aesthetic sensibility. But his delineation of the Abbey in Don Juan shows an intense architectural awareness of the building itself in its wooded, watery setting, and of the way its architectural elements of many different periods come together to create the fluid random beauty so characteristic of the English country house.”
At eleven, George moved to Nottingham to live with his nefarious nurse. MacCarthy offers “The memories of female dominance, the large nurse in the small bed, affected his later attitude to sex with women. Byron found a mature woman a complicated structure, threateningly flabby. He preferred the physique of young teenage boys, or the girls dressed as boys that became a feature of his early days in London. Byron’s preferred bodies would be youthful, lithe and firm.” There is no doubt some truth in this but it is a simplistic analysis of a very complex area of a very complex man.
MacCarthy does acknowledge some of this complexity, although she quotes from an earlier author to do so: “‘ it seemed as if two different souls occupied his body alternately. One was feminine, and full of sympathy; the other masculine, and characterised by clear judgement, and by a rare power of presenting for consideration those facts only which were required for forming a decision. When one arrived the other departed. In company, his sympathetic soul was his tyrant. Alone, or with a single person, his masculine prudence displayed itself as his friend. No man could then arrange facts, investigate their causes, or examine their consequences, with more logical accuracy, or in a more practical spirit. Yet, in his most sagacious moment, the entrance of a third person would derange the order of his ideas, – judgement fled, and sympathy, generally laughing, took its place. Hence he appeared in his conduct extremely capricious, while in his opinions he had really great firmness. He often, however, displayed a feminine turn for deception in trifles, while at the same time he possessed a feminine candour of soul, and a natural love of truth, which made him often despise himself quite as much as he despised English fashionable society for what he called its brazen hypocrisy.’” I find this quotation decidedly curious, reliant as it is on anachronistic gender stereotypes. However, the detail about Byron’s erratic moods and temperament is valuable.
In many regards, a serious biography of Byron, unless it included close analysis of his writings, would end at about the point where Gilmour’s did. Much of what MacCarthy writes about the subsequent years relates to his various affairs with women. MacCarthy’s focus on Byron’s sexual activity unfortunately tempts her into some amateur psychoanalysis: “His power over women freed him from his consciousness of being the derided cripple, and distracted him from the homosexual instincts he was straining to repress.” Perhaps.

In this part of the book, MacCarthy covers Byron’s first trip out of Britain, including his introduction to Greece, and the start of his love for it. She argues that “Byron’s sense of liberty was not merely theoretic. There was a personal dimension to his philhellenism which resulted from his always passionate response to the places and people that he knew – a facet of the peculiar intelligence that made him a great poet: pessimism at the human condition tempered by delight in individual human vagaries. In Greece, as later in Italy, Byron’s identification with an oppressed minority was partly the product of his own resistance to authority, the outcast allying himself with the intransigents.”
There is certainly some sort of common thread in his hero-worship of Napoleon, George Washington and Simon Bolivar, and then in his support for the re-unification of Italy, the independence of Greece from the Ottomans, and then his horror of Peterloo. However, attributing these to “resistance to authority, the outcast allying himself with the intransigents” again seems simplistic. And it fails to address the thorny problem that he was also a complete snob, always focused on his noble heritage and his place in the hierarchy. He was evidently not appalled at the idea that he might be invited to become king of Greece.
His rejection of his own nation and the romantic identification with other parts has re-appeared in many a liberal to this day, as has the solipsism: “Even now, after so many setbacks and humiliations, Byron had not lost his grand ambition to do great things. If he lived ten years longer he foresaw that he would startle the world with something that ‘like the cosmogony, or creation of the world, will puzzle the philosophers of all ages’.” His ideas on the trajectory of liberal history have been shown somewhat wanting: “‘The king-times are fast finishing. There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist; but the peoples will conquer in the end. I shall not live to see it, but I foresee it.’” I suspect he thought “the end” would be a little earlier than now, and yet, unaccountable as it might seem, British royalty is proving very resilient. Mind you, the House of Lords has changed markedly.
MacCarthy notes that Byron regards writers in general as artisan parvenus: “Byron claimed to dislike the company of other writers. Some of this was simple snobbery: the unwillingness of the peer of England to associate himself with mere professionals.” And he was bored by the literary in-crowd of his time… chose to align himself in London with poets who had made their reputation decades earlier”
MacCarthy argues in relation to his feelings about Greece, that “What Byron envisaged at this period was not total independence: he thought it unrealistic to imagine that the Greeks would rise again ‘to their pristine superiority’. The best he could foresee was their liberation from the Turks by some other foreign power, allowing Greece to become a ‘useful dependency, or even a free state with a proper guarantee’.” So there was an element of unromanticised realism. Perhaps that was also present when, despite his hostility towards Lord Elgin regarding the Parthenon marbles, ”He also brought some Greek marbles on Hobhouse’s behalf.”
There was something unrealistically Quixotic too to his speech in the House of Lords decrying the idea of punishment for the Nottingham stocking-makers who smashed the new machinery they feared would put them out of work. As sound as some of his speech was, there is a suspicion that making an oratorical impression might have been more important to him that achieving justice for the workers.
There are so many contradictions or, at least, inconsistencies to Lord Byron.
With all his political radicalism, and all his sexual shenanigans, he would not allow Allegra, the daughter he fathered with Claire Clairmont to remain living in Shelley’s atheistic house with her mother. And there is a weird mixture of love, affection, cold indifference, heartlessness, wryness when he writes to a friend: “‘I am a little puzzled how to dispose of this new production … but shall probably send for & place it in a Venetian convent – to become a good Catholic - & (it may be) a Nun.” “ it took him another year to send for her. He informed his friend and agent Douglas Kinnaird on 13 January 1818 that he had finally decided to ‘acknowledge & breed her myself – giving her the name of Biron (to distinguish her from little Legitimacy)’.”
MacCarthy offers this reasonably convincing explanation: “His sceptical temperament made him the more susceptible to a religion of moral dogmatism. In this respect Catholicism was the equivalent of the Calvinism of his boyhood. His emotionalism and theatricality responded to Catholicism’s outward show: ‘What with incense, pictures, statues, altars, shrines, relics, and the real presence, confession, absolution, – there is something sensible to grasp at.’ He liked Catholicism’s excess. Byron felt that if people had any religion at all than they could not have enough.”
One of the more curious aspects of Byron’s life is in relation to his marriage; after years of promiscuity, he was persuaded by Lady Melbourne to marry her niece. MacCarthy’s comment: “Byron’s approach to marriage was a characteristic blend of fatalism and panic. In a show of cynicism he had decided that all prospective wives would be much the same: he had no heart to spare, and would expect none in return. Through 1813 and 1814 Miss Milbanke had merely been one of many options.” (In this book, Milbanke appears only as a victim; in fact, her life was much more empowered and interesting than that.) “What was lethal in Byron was his emotional duplicity. The language of love came all too easily to the great amatory poet, and indeed he seems to have been writing himself into a temporary belief in his own sincerity. Love in absentia was one thing. It was the reality of love with a complicated, well-bred, intellectual female, the face-to-face demands, the challenges, the suffocating cosiness, that Byron could not bear.” I think MacCarthy writes very well about this.
Subsequently, at various times, the pair were happy together, but Byron could also be violent, and was often away; rumours were gathering about his intimacy with his step-sister and, after the intervention of his wife’s family, separation was agreed. Beginning with some unhelpful verbal gymnastics, MacCarthy describes Byron’s odd reaction: “Byron had a mental capacity for obliteration amounting to amnesia. He had blocked out the rows and tears, hysterics and rampagings of the past few months, telling Hobhouse that he and Annabella had ‘parted good friends’
“Hobhouse noted in his diary, ‘he does not care about his wife now – that is certain.’ Though Byron was always to retain a strange ability to correspond with Lady Byron as if they were still on terms of unchanged intimacy, he made clear to his confidential friends the hatred he now felt for her. The relationship was one of settled enmity.”
A fair amount of the latter half of Byron: Life and Legend is taken up with his excursion to Greece for the independence fight. However, since he actually did remarkably little there, this simply chronicles his doing remarkably little.
I shall conclude with two notes dating from his time in Greece. The first is an extraordinary, silly return to psychoanalytical mode by MacCarthy, a few days before his death: . “By the morning of 15 April, Byron had changed his mind. He had had a better night and would not be bled. Why was he so resistant to bleeding? Partly, perhaps, because he saw it as a quasi-sexual violation of the body, a final invasion of his deepest privacy.”
Perhaps it is now appropriate to end with an example of Byron’s wit. He had to suffer an enema during an illness earlier in Greece (described as an “anal enema” by MacCarthy, presumably to prevent confusion with other enemas?). Byron had heard of a London case in which a bishop had been caught in flagrante with a soldier, and charged and found guilty. In reflecting on his own medical treatment, Byron mused, “‘if the episcopal instrument at all resembled the damp squirt of the Ligurian apothecary – the crime will have carried its own chastisement along with it.’”

[Sheila · Rating 5 out of 5]

For the Byronistas, this is a feast of a book. Intelligently written and scrupulously researched, it brings the poet, hedonist and his rackety world to life

[Diana · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m not a biography person, but the great thing about Byron is that his life was like that of a fictional character and that he himself lived it as if he thought he was one, self-immortalising and fictionalising as he went. For any other biography I would’ve been bored by the level of detail, but here it works. Terrible man, great poet, bonkers life.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Prime source for all things Byron without a detail left untold. Reading will make you feel as if you were a passenger to George Gordon's life. That being said, this is not a light and 'fun' read. This biography is very well written, but not simply a leisure read to destress.

[Smiley III · Rating 5 out of 5]

Know Byron??

They stopped to pass the time of day with Byron's friend the sexton in the cemetery at Certosa, who case acquisitive eyes on Rogers' skull-like head. In company with such a professional connoisseur Byron returned to the art galleries in Florence he had enjoyed in 1817, but complained that there were too many visitors crammed in to allow him 'to feel anything properly.'

Do ya??

Byron arrive in a Pisa that was beautiful and melancholy with its nearly deserted monuments and strangely leaning tower. Shelley had described it when he first arrived there as 'a large disagreeable city almost without inhabitants.' Apart from it's ancient university, Pisa seemed like a city with little raison d'être.

Punk??

Like the city itself, the Palazzo Lanfranchi [house Byron had found for the Shelleys to live in] had a certain grimness. Thomas Medwin remembered it as 'large, gloomy, and uncomfortable.' To Shelley the entrance hall 'seemed built for giants.'

Really??

Byron's life in Pisa was secluded. He avoided the university professors with an arrogance that made him unpopular with local intellectuals ... He gravitated towards the Shelleys and the group of literary, military expatriates around them.

Let's see:

The first production would be Shakespeare's Othello, with Byron as Iago, a part in which he often admired Edmund Kean. They got as far as the first run-through which persuaded Thomas Medwin that Byron could have been one of the world's great actors ... It was said that Byron even looked like Iago. But Teresa became jealous of the prospective Desdemona, John Taffe's companion Madame Regny, whom she judged to be now in determined pursuit of Byron, and she vetoed the performance.

It's like they say: "OLD" SOULS could do anything they put their mind to.

And:

But his hatred of Lady Noel, whom he still held largely responsible for the separation, had remained implacable. At Christmas 1821, when Byron and his friends assembled at the Palazzo Lanfranchi for a celebration, he had made a heartless bet of £1,000 with Shelley that Lady Noel would outlive Shelley's father Sir Timothy ... [But w]hen he heard the news just over two weeks later [that she had died], Byron had the grave to forgive her memory, reacting with an unexpected surge of feeling, as so often, to the fact of death.

Nice!

But some would think:

Soon after Cain was published, clergyman began denouncing it in pulpits round the country as 'a book calculated to spread infidelity.' The attacks on its author were hysterical and personal. The Revered John Styles, for example, preached a sermon in Holland Chapel, Kennington, in which he denounced Byron as 'a denaturalized being, who, having exhausted every species of sensual gratification, and denied the cup of sin to its bitterest dregs, is resolved to show that he is no longer human, even in his frailties, but a cool, unconcerned fiend.'

Yeah!

And:

With his natural affinity for the heirs of Washington [i.e., revolutionaries - ed.], and a sense of being more persona grata in America than he was in England, Byron accepted an invitation from the Commodore to visit the frigate Constitution ... Every single officer and guest on board was introduced to him. Byron was assailed by an American fan, an officer's wife, Mrs. Catherine Potter Stith, who begged him for the rose he was wearing in his buttonhole so that she could carry it back to America. He was shown a baby boy, son of a sailor, born recently on born the Constitution. To Byron's approval the child had been christened 'Constitution Jones.'

Nice!

And:

Why did Byron continue in a situation he found intolerable? Why did he not withdraw from The Liberal, a venture he already felt was far from certain to succeed? Natural inertia. A strain of masochism. A sense of gratitude and loyalty to Hunt who had stuck by him 'through thick & thin — when all shook, and some shuffled in 1816.' He did not feel he could renege on The Liberal once his support had been promised: for all his prevarication Byron remained a man of his word.

This is a very understanding author. To understand others, you have to understand yourself. Nothing can get in the way. Otherwise, you might let it. It's the truth.

Here, see this:

In Napier's later view, of all the many foreigners who came to help the Greeks only Byron and Thomas Gordon, the one experienced military member of the London Greek Committee, managed to achieve a balanced view of the Greek War. ¶ 'All came expecting to find the Peloponnesus filled with Plutarch's men, and all returned thinking the inhabitants of Newgate were moral. Lord Byron judged them fairly' he knew that half-civilized men are full of vices, and that great allowance must be made for emancipated slaves. He, therefore, proceeded, bridle in hand, not thinking them good, but hoping to make them better.'

This is eloquent.

Of course:

Byron, of all people, could recognize a flatterer. He was under no illusions about the Greek capacity for self-serving and tortuous behaviour. 'The worst of them is — that (to use a coarse but the only expression that will not fall short of the truth) they are such d—d liars; — there was never such an incapacity for veracity shown since Eve lived in Paradise.' [Funny! - ed.] But his years of independent living abroad in largely foreign households had given him great tolerance. He viewed the Greek character philosophically. His own love of verbal ingenuity allowed him to appreciate the Greeks' great elasticity with words: ¶ 'One of them found fault the other day with the English language — because it had so few shades of a Negative — whereas a Greek can so modify a No — to a yes — and vice versa — by the slippery qualities of his language — that prevarication may be carried to any extent and still leave a loop-hole through which perjury may slip with out being perceived.' ¶ Compared with the professional administrators — Captain Knox on Ithaca and the unusually enlightened Napier — who tended to regard the Greeks as wayward children, Bryon was able to accept them as they were and even to rejoice in their difference.

Well, fair is fair.

And:

Byron confessed: 'I especially dread, in this world, two things, to which I have reason to believe I am equally predisposed — growing fat and growing mad; and it would be difficult for me to decide, were I forced to make a choice, which of these conditions I would choose in preference.'

Yes, well, we all have our choices to make, don't we??

Such as:

At one o'clock he got up so that his bed could be made. Two of the servants supported him through to the next room. Bruno followed and, becoming tearful, implored Byron to give in and allow a fourth bleeding. But he said he did not want any more blood to be taken: 'if I am destined to die from this disease, I shall perish whether I am bled or whether I am left all my blood' .... Quite possibly the doctors were [later] called in to see Byron twice. He had been reluctant to see them agreeing only on condition they made their diagnosis and said nothing. When, feeling his pulse, one of them attempted to address him, he said: 'Recollect your promise and go away' ... Modern medical opinion attributes Byron's death to an infection, with massive over-bleeding as the immediate cause. Dr. Raymond Mills, who has made a special study of Byron's last illness, views the fever which began on 9 April as a febrile illness not directly connected with the fit at the monastery two months before. He proposes Mediterranean tick fever, an infection spread by dog ticks, as more likely than the malaria most often assumed to have been the cause of Byron's death. If this is the case then Lyon the Newfoundland and Moretto the bulldog are new candidates for the blame. Dr. Mills has calculated Byron's total blood loss from both lances and leeches was at least 2.5 litres, 43 per cent of his blood volume, a loss in itself great enough to have killed him. He was further dehydrated by purgings and the blisters that were being applied.

You don't say!

And then:

Lord John Manners, a child at the time, remembered the effect of the announcement on a ceremonial dinner being given at Belvoir Castle to the gentlemen of the Belvoir Hunt. A letter was handed to the host, the Duke of Rutland, who rose and announced: 'Gentlemen, grave news has just been brought to me. Lord Byron has died in Greece.' There was stunned silence, after which the hunting squires, recovering themselves, began exchanging their favourite passages from Byron's poetry ... The process of whitewashing Byron's posthumous reputation was [then] already under way.

It's how it goes.

Hobhouse now became obsessed with the idea that Byron's memoirs had to be destroyed. His friends rallied round and offered to buy them back from Murray, [with] Kinnaird and Burdett each offering to repay the £2,000 while Hobhouse thought he could find £1,000 himself. Why was Hobhouse, who had never read the memoirs, so desperate to put them out of circulation? No doubt he was nervous about their sexual content. He was aware, both from Moore and from the rumours circulating amongst those who had already read the manuscript, that the second part contained accounts of Byron's erotic adventures with a multiplicity of women in Italy.

You don't say.

In Panayiotis Kannellopoulos' recent ten-volume History of the European Spirit, Bryon, allotted his own large chapter, is singled out as a unique phenomenon. 'There is no other poet who meant in his time what Byron meant throughout Europe.' HIs richly energetic life opened up the possibility for writers and artists to play a more significant role in politics. This was recognised by the Italian revolutionary leader Giuseppe Mazzini who wrote in his essay on 'Byron and Goethe': 'I know no more beautiful symbol of the future destiny and mission or art than the death of Bryon in Greece. The holy alliance of poetry with the cause of the peoples; the union — still so rare — of thought and action which alone completes the human Word.' As well as challenging the conventional division between the creative artist and the political activist he had overcome the ordinary barriers of nationality: Byron became a national hero in a country not his own. And in interpreting Europe to the English and explaining England to the continent, Bryon initiated a two-way process which, it might be claimed, is not completed yet.

Wow!

But:

The Byron worshipped in Europe was of course a different creature, more intense, more spectral, than the quipping English peer of the London coffee houses, the young sportsman who bought his pistols at Manton's and sparred with 'Gentleman' Jackson, spent marathon evenings exchanging fantastical stories with Scrope Davies, haunted the Green Room at Drury Lane. His European admirers did not comprehend the English dandy side of Byron. They had no access to his letters. His poetry most often reached them in translation and they felt most easily attuned to the stern grandeur of Manfred, the extended agonies of The Prisoner of Chillon. THey had little or no appreciation of the English sharpness of his wit. ¶ When Lamartine, in his poem 'L'Hommage à Lord Byron,' published in 1820, had referred to Byron as 'chantre des enfers,' poet of the underworld, Bryon had been indignant. Lady Blessington quoted him as saying: 'I dislike French verse so much I have not read more than a few lines of the one in which I am dragged into public view. He calls me "Espirit mystérieux, mortel, ange ou démon"; which I call very uncivil, for a well-bred Frenchman."'

Ha!

That'll show 'em.

You know:

The well-read Jane was herself an admirer of Byron, stiffening herself for what was shocking in his work. Byron had been the language of her problematic courtship; echoes of Byron run through their correspondence and in 1822 Carlyle had sent Jane Werner, with a letter telling her she must not give him up. Before her future husband's letter on Byron's death had reached her she had written her own letter to him: ¶ 'And Byron is dead! I was told it all at once in a roomful of people. My God, if they had said that the sun or the moon had gone out of the heavens, it could not have not struck me with the idea of a more awful and dreary blank in the creation than the words "Byron is dead!" I have felt quite cold and dejected ever since: all my thoughts have been fearful and dismal. I wish you were come.' ¶ It is interesting that she fixes on the exact place she heard the news, a common response to the sudden death of a celebrity, comparable to that of John F. Kennedy or Diana, Princess of Wales in another century.

And, of course:

In the parsonage at Haworth in the early 1830s the surviving Brontë children, Charlotte, Branwell, Anne and Emily, read Byron's poetry and absorbed the details of his life through Thomas Moore's biography. They responded to the exoticism of the Eastern tales and the influence of Byron is clear in their invented kingdoms of Angria and Gondal ... In the Brontë sisters' novel the Byronic hero, the flawed angel, the man of demoniac attractiveness, emerged with a compelling imaginative power. In Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff is the Byron figure: the 'tall, athletic, well-formed man' who bears the distinct marks of his former degradation in the half-civilised ferocity lurking in the depressed brows and in his 'eyes full of black fire' ... In Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre the saturnine hero Mr. Rochester is Byronic in his past sexual transgression, his doomed marriage, the secret horror of the madwoman hidden in the attic, his arrogant attempt to inveigle Jane into an illegal wedding. Corrupt, he is also disconcertingly attractive. Is Rochester redeemable? In creating her character Charlotte draws not only on Byron's Childe Harold and the equivocal dark-browed heroes of Byron's Turkish tales; Charlotte too had evidently read Tom Moore attentively and Rochester has attributes of the real-life Byron as portrayed by Moore.

Huh.

Almost immediately after his death the phenomenon of 'being Byron' began to manifest itself. His closest nineteenth-century admirers could be seen imitating his dress and aristocratic langour, contacting people who had met him, making reminiscent visits to the places he had known, writing poetry in a mock-Byronic style, infiltrating his characters into novels of his own, affecting his reputation for sexual irresistibility. Byron's style was imitated both to compensate for perceived inadequacies and, in a spirit of emulation, to further the celebrity of his imitators. Prime examples of those who modelled themselves on him in the Victorian period were Benjamin Disraeli, Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Byron's relative by marriage Wilfrid Scawen Blunt .

There you go!!!

As [the procession of mourning carriages] passed through Kentish Town, Mary Shelley watched from her window with Jane Williams as the last remains of Albe went by: Mary had already been to see his corpse laid out in Westminster. 'You will not wonder,' she wrote to Trelawny, 'that the late loss of L[ord] B[yron] makes me cling with greater zeal [to] those dear friends who remain to me.'

So.

[Zandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an extremely detailed biography of Byron, with all his sexual predilections presented fully and dispassionately. Curiously, given that Byron was famous for being depraved, I found the most interesting part of the book was the account of his disastrous marriage: why, exactly, did he think it was a good idea to marry the most priggish woman he had ever met? Prior to the marriage both had their doubts, both tried to pull out, but both felt compelled to go forward into a relationship that brought out all that was worst in Byron's nature, and which ended, after just a year, in disgrace and exile.

For such a book, so full and factual, I felt there were a few glaring omissions. In particular, I didn't feel MacCarthy really got to the heart of Byron's appeal. The man's popularity was phenomenal. No poet today could influence and inspire a nation and nations of people through their life and work and death. Have we lost the capacity to have really emotional responses to the power of the written word? Curiously Byron's poetry has not had the same level of enduring popularity as the work of other Romantic poets, yet in his time, his work was regarded as sensational. Perhaps MacCarthy needs to help us understand more the context within which Bryon lived and wrote.

I think the challenge for a biographer is always to balance the detailed facts of their subject's lives with a sense of the bigger historical perspective. MacCarthy is brilliant on all the detail, and in relation to some episodes, such as Byron's marriage, I found this detail fascinating. But I think MacCarthy needed to give her reader more sense of the wider context and the larger issues.

[Shelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't typically read biographies, but this was a fun read. After spending the second half of my semester focusing on one part of Lord Byron's life, it was refreshing to read about something other than his separation. While my favorite parts of the book included the relationship between Byron and John Cam Hobhouse -- they were fun friends! -- I was fascinated by the connections between Byron's self image and his relationship with his sister, Augusta.

There seemed to be a lot of focus on Byron and his eating habits, fear of gaining weight, and his weight fluctuation (just like Oprah!) He was so conscience of his image and was especially finicky when it came to his portraits and busts. (It's cool LB, I untag myself on Facebook ALL THE TIME!) He would refuse them to be used if they were (thought by him to be) that bad. Though his vanity was off the charts, I still couldn't resist his charms! And neither could his sister, Augusta!

There were rumors and speculation of their incestuous relationship, but now we can safely say, "Yes, they knocked boots." What I found interesting is that Augusta was similar to Byron in that they had a similar personality traits and mannerisms (hey! so do my sister and me!) and referring back to Byron's vain tendencies, I can't help but wonder if (at least for Byron) this was a narcissistic relationship. Byron was attracted to himself, and Augusta was a pretty close second. -- Although, it could also be argued that Byron wasn't vain, but incredibly insecure (or both).

I also liked reading about the progression of Byron. As I neared toward the end of the book, and Byron's time in Greece, it was odd to think back about his early life in Greece and how much he matured. Good work, LB!

[Marigold · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very long but engaging bio; I read some Byron in college (English Lit major, after all) but honestly didn't know that much about him except that he was a 19th century celebrity - maybe one of the first celebrity writers - famous for his wealth, status, physical beauty, and lifestyle as much as his poetry. I knew he spent a lot of time in Italy and Greece, & that he got involved in a Greek war. I knew he was involved with Lady Caroline Lamb and that she called him "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." (Always an intriguing combo when it comes to Dead Poets.)

Now that I know more about him, I feel like I have a better idea of the real Byron and the background of his life and times. I think he was probably fun to be with and a pain in the ass! It sounds like it's possible he was bipolar, though MacCarthy doesn't speculate about that; she mentions that he went through major depressions but it sounds like he was also a bit manic to me. I don't remember knowing that he had a disability affecting one of his feet. He seems to have inspired great love in some people, great dislike in others, and both in quite a few. He definitely seems to have treated people quite cavalierly in general, which makes it challenging to find him admirable. But he was definitely not boring!

Overall an interesting read. Oh, I also have to note that I decided to take this on vacation with me - on a road trip through eastern Oregon! My husband and I like to build in plenty of relaxing and reading time in our trips, & sometimes we go to quiet bars where we can actually bring our books, sip a drink & read - which we did this time - & that makes me wonder if I'm the only person ever to have read about Byron in a bar in Halfway, Oregon & a park in Pendleton!

[Tara♥ · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Mad, bad, and dangerous to know”
― Lady Caroline Lamb

Oh this was a doozy of a biography. I haven’t read many biographies of historical figures, so I can’t definitively say that this is ‘thee‘ best one, but it was fairly freaking thorough and the research involved was such that this is probably as in depth a look as we are ever going to get of George Gordon Byron.

Because this is such a comprehensive biography this review feels kind of impossible. Byron may have only lived 36 years but he packed a lot into that 36 years. A lot of it worth dissecting, but I’m going to try just hit my highlights, if I started to dig into Byron’s life properly this would be a thesis.

So to start, it’s probably important that I divulge the fact that I went into this book a big Byron hater. As a fan of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley, a lot of my knowledge of Byron came from stories surrounding Shelley and her family. The main story that stuck with me was that of Shelley’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont, and the untimely death of Byron and Clairmont’s daughter Allegra. After reading this book I have a much better understanding of Byron and his relationship with Clairmont (who was no angel), and I can safely say that I hate him more. I have that most rare of insights now; well informed hate!

Now look, it would be impossible to read this and not recognise the genius of Byron. He was immensely talented and a true superstar of his day. He was also very troubled, a huge misogynist, and kind of terrible human being.

Byron had so unquenchable a thirst for celebrity, that no means were left untried that might attain it: this frequently led to his expressing opinion totally at variance with his actions and real sentiments… there was no sort of celebrity he did not, at some period or other, condescend to seek, and he was not very nice in the means, provided he obtained the end.

One of the most mind-blowing things in this book was learning how old the concept of the parasocial relationships with celebrities is. People being unhealthily obsessed with celebrities online was nothing on the fangirls of the early 1800’s. Women were sending him wigs worth of hair, and more than a few stalked him, with some even breaking into his house. Byron did what any unhinged celebrity would do, he encouraged and slept with some of these women, and then discarded them, usually in a very cruel way. He seemed to struggle a lot with the idea of celebrity, as the above quote suggests he wanted it all costs, but when he got it, he often resented it.

“If I do not write to empty my mind, I go mad.”
― George Gordon Byron


Along with his crazy unhealthy parasocial relationships, Byron also worked on cultivating crazy unhealthy romantic relationships. These ranged in both age (some ages very problematic) and sex. One of his most unhinged romances, (and I’m not going to lie, the most entertaining), was with Lady Caroline Lamb. I think today it would be very clear that Caroline was unwell, but oh boy did she cause a stir. Caroline is thought to have coined the famous quote about Byron being ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’. She was also instrumental in giving Annabelle Milbanke the proof she needed to obtain a divorce from Byron. She really giving a face to ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’. Caroline Lamb went NUCLEAR, and I for one think he deserved it.

Byron, who had always resisted sharing his bed with a woman, made it clear that the marriage bed was no delight to him. He told Annabella that ‘one animal of the kind was good to him as another’, provided she was young.

I still honestly cannot understand what possessed this man to marry! There is a vague assumption in the book that the reason he married Annabelle Milbanke was to punish her for having rejected his original proposal, and honestly, that totally tracks. Byron punishing those who he perceives to have done him wrong, even at the expense of his one happiness, is very on point. He was often his own worst enemy, and his treatment of Annabelle was ultimately the beginning of his downfall. It put Caroline Lamb in a position to punish him for how he treated her, and this gave Annabelle the ammunition to punish him for how he treated her. And not to sound like a broken record, but he deserved to be exiled.

Some of the most interesting and infamous stories about Byron come from his exile on the continent. The famous house party with the ghost stories which brought us Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein happened in Geneva in 1816. His famous exploits in Venice with just about anybody who crossed his path happened between 1816 and 1818. And the events that led him to Greece.

“A drop of ink may make a million think.”
― George Gordon Byron

‘The fact is, riches are power, and poverty is slavery all over the earth, and one sort of establishment is no better, nor worse, for a people that another.’ ― George Gordon Byron

Byron may not have been the best of humans in how he lived his life, but I do feel like he did have the best of intentions when it came to most of his political motivations. I think he truly wanted to liberate Greece, and I don’t think him going to help with that liberation was a vanity project. It was very ill-advised, but I do think that he did it for all the right reasons. Unfortunately those reasons weren’t enough to keep him from dying. Neither were the physicians he had on hand, Dr Francesco Bruno and Dr Julius Millingen. On 9 April 1824, Byron fell ill, and what followed was what can only be described and an absolute shit show.

‘Have you no other remedy than bleeding? — there are many more die of the lancet than the lance.’

After Byron made this declaration he was practically hounded by both Bruno and Millingen, until he finally relented to being bled on 16 April after Millingen told him that “neither he nor Dr. Bruno could answer for the consequences’; the disease, Millingen added, might otherwise ‘operate such disorganisation in his cerebral and nervous system as to deprive him of his reason”. Of course Byron didn’t relent without telling both Doctors how he really felt about the matter:

Come; you are, I see, a d–d set of butchers. Take away as much blood as you will; but have done with it.”

They preceded to bleed him three times, although he did continue to fight the later bleedings. Between the second and third bleeding he stated:

‘if I am destined to die from this disease, I shall perish whether I am bled or whether I am left with all my blood.’

Unfortunately though, more ‘experts’ were brought in and it feels very much like a ‘too many cooks’ situation. It’s very apparent now, looking through a modern medical lens that the cure was what killed Byron.

Modern medical opinion attributes Byron’s death to an infection, with massive over-bleeding as an immediate cause. Dr. Raymond Mills, who has made a special study of Byron’s last illness, views the fever which began on 9 April as febrile illness not directly connected with the fit at the monastery two months before. He preposes Mediterranean tick fever, an infection spread by dog ticks, as more likely than the malaria most often assumed to have been the cause of Byron’s death. If this is the case then Lyon the Newfoundland and Moretto the bulldog are new candidates to blame. Dr. Mills has calculated Byron’s total blood loss from both lances and leeches as at least 2.5 liters, 43 per cent of his blood volume, a loss in itself great enough to have killed him. He was further dehydrated by purgings and blisters that were being applied.

I’m a little salty about the author mentioning the dogs here. I think given the time, we can’t blame Dr Francesco Bruno and Dr Julius Millingen for Byron’s death, but actually naming Lyon and Moretto and not Bruno and Millingen seems very unfair.


Ultimately George Finlay was right in his judgement that ‘the Genius of Lord Byron’ would in all probability never have unfolded either political or military talent. He was not disposed to assume an active part in public affairs.’

I added a question in this section when I was drafting this review, ‘What would Byron’s future have looked like had he not died when he did?’ Obviously that’s an impossible question to answer, but I, like George Finlay, don’t think he would have achieved much of anything in Greece. I think he provided boost in moral to those on the ground, but in the long run I don’t think he would have had any impact. I think he would have either died in actual battle, or gone back to Italy without achieving what he had set out to do. I think had he lived a long life, he would have burned so many bridges that he would have died destitute and alone. It probably sounds very harsh, and very cold, but I think he died at the best time he could have. His reputation wasn’t a good one, but had Byron made it back to Italy, I think he would have spent the rest of his life making it worse. As it stood, the reputation he left behind lives on in literature even today!

“And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on.”
― George Gordon Byron

I really appreciated the last section of this book. ‘The Byron Cult’ dealt with the repatriation of his body, and the influence he had on European and English art. The repatriation part was particularly fascinating, I was aware of his body being buried in England, but I honestly hadn’t thought about the logistics of getting it there from Greece in the early 1800’s. It was also super interesting learning about the fable of the ‘Byronic hero’, (which I kind of feel like he would have hated) and how that has shaped modern art. It’s given me a lot more to read about, that’s for sure.

Just to end, I usually read my non-fiction picks electronically or via audio, it has been a long time since I read a physical copy of a non-fiction book and I think that’s for the best. I tabbed this book to within an inch of it’s life, and it’s another reason this review was so difficult. There are so many quotes I wanted to use, but going through all the tabs to find them was a job in itself.

Ultimately I’m glad I read this, I know I said I’m a hater, and I definitely am that, but this wasn’t a hate read. Byron was an incredibly complex person and it was absolutely worth getting to know him. I was honestly shocked by how charismatic he seemed to be, so many were drawn to him, and often forgave him the most egregious of sins. I am a hater, but I too am very intrigued by him. I could see myself visiting Newstead or staying at Seaham Hall. That’s some powerful mojo he has going on, but I’m also nosey as fuck and Newstead looks cool, and a spa weekend in Seaham Hall would be for historical and relaxation purposes!

[Elizabeth Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm being unfair.

There's a stupendous amount of detail and background in this book, but I found the amount of information on Byron's sex life rather obsessive. Certainly it was unusual, and certainly he thought it was perfectly fascinating, but do we really need all this medical detail? Take T.A.J. Burnett's biography of Scrope Davies – we have a good idea of what is going on, but without itemizing every body part involved.

Where Byron's death is concerned, in contrast, the medical detail is very illuminating! Maybe I'm just squeamish.

Returning to this book some years later, this time for research purposes rather than just for fun, I've revised my rating from two to four stars. It's an invaluable resource for anyone interested in Byron's life and times. Clearly structured chapter and page headings make it easy to navigate, the references are helpful and scholarly.

[Mina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Byron was a genius ahead of his time!
'Religion was no comfort.When his friend Hodgson.... seized the opportunity to preach about afterlife, Byron sent a strong rebuff:'
'I will have nothing to do with your immortality; we are miserable enough in this life, without absurdity of speculating upon another. If men are to live, why we die at all? and if they die, why disturb the sweet and sound sleep that " knows no waking"?'

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an AMAZING biography for anyone interested in Byron. I stumbled around a while trying to research which bio seemed to get the most praise and didn't rely on gossip/scandal to encompass most of the pages, which brought me to Life and Legend. It is an exhaustive study and will leave you with a substantially better understanding of Byron.

[Lisa Hopwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely excellent biography, can’t rate this highly enough. It’s clearly been lovingly researched & written in a non-academic style which appeals to me, I’m not studying a Masters!

As an amateur Byronist though I found myself unable to put this down, even though I knew most of the historical facts within there’s still loads of detail I haven’t seen before, at least presented together in such a volume. MacCarthy goes to great lengths to explain the difficult circumstances Byron found himself in during the Greek War of Independence, a complex situation in itself.

I also enjoyed the additional chapters at the end which go some way to explain Byron’s influence after his untimely death, through the Victorian era into the C20th, although I think she’s missed a trick by not taking this further through the last 50 years, particularly within music & film etc.

Sadly MacCarthy has recently passed away but leaves behind one of the best modern biographies of Mr Captivating there will ever be. The buck stops here.

[Herrholz Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lord George Gordon, also known as Byron
A Great Poet was he, in an age of romance bygone
His native land he fled, in haste and utter dread
To a place more libertarian, himself a young contrarian.


Passion was his master, in word and in deed
Restless for adventure, quenching every need
Oh men, how they envied him, women all each other
Lord George Gordon Byron had, first one and then another.


For Freedom he did bravely fight in wars on distant shores
For Grecian people in their plight his fame was thus ensured
`Mad, bad and dangerous`, was Byron once described
A life cut short too early, for liberty he died.


Now most of what we know of Byron, now as in his time
Is filtered, massaged, manipulated through the grapevine
The real import of this man is not the life he led
But what he wrote in verse and rhyme, the poetry instead.

[Allegra Byron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una de las mejores biografías que he leído sobre Lord Byron, sobre todo porque deja atrás la mojigatería y la hipocresía con la que se ha tratado a la figura del poeta en anteriores biografías.
Basada en numerosísimas fuentes, es un gusto tener entre manos este retrato del poeta y de la época tan completo. A día de hoy podemos decir que existe muchísimo material suyo y de su entorno, aunque siempre nos quedará la duda de qué escribió Byron en sus Memorias (esas que ardieron en contra del deseo del poeta en la chimenea de su editor prácticamente un mes después de su fallecimiento)
Si no conoces la vida de Lord Byron, esta es tu oportunidad, y si ya la conoces, este libro es una de las mejores celebraciones en el bicentenario de su fallecimiento.

[Javier Muñoz · Rating 4 out of 5]

"loco, malo, y peligroso de conocer"

Lord Byron es una leyenda, un arquetipo, un símbolo:
1.-
Byron no es sólo un poeta; es una leyenda. Su vida—escándalos, exilios, amores, excesos, muerte heroica—lo convierte en un personaje más grande que la realidad.

2.-
Se transforma en un modelo recurrente en la literatura:
el “héroe byroniano”, melancólico, orgulloso, brillante, autodestructivo, apasionado y cínico. Es una forma humana reconocible incluso fuera de sus obras.

3.-
Representa la libertad radical, la insumisión, el culto a la vida intensa y a la sensibilidad extrema. Es también símbolo del romanticismo llevado a su límite.

[Rosie · Rating 4 out of 5]

oh boy! lord byron sure was an interesting guy to read, i don’t really know how to rate a biography though? as somebody who is also bisexual, which was the reason he intrigued me, the biographer …. sometimes they would say things in reference to his sexuality that just seemed so icky? that was my biggest qualm with the information honestly …. lord byron seemed like a fun dude though, wouldve we gotten along? probably not but i sure enjoyed reading about him and want to learn more so

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful biography. Detailed but written with a great deal of energy so it was never a boring nor a difficult read. MacCarthy really brought Byron to life, to the point where I actually felt a bit sad when he died.

I wouldn't say it was definitive, there were a couple of areas I would've liked to have given more interest about. Ada Lovelace's life post-Byron, perhaps or maybe some context around just how HUGE he was at the height of his fame.

But honestly, I can't really fault it.

[LeeAnne Holloway · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's well written but I need to DNF about 20% in. This man is so gross, that it actually became uncomfortable reading it. I appreciate the author telling the truth without going into too much gory detail, but man it was exhausting reading through the enormous amount of underage flings this grown man had.

[Yoruichi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too bad it is mostly about his sexual adventures with very little depiction of his political ideas, which made Byron seem like quite monolithic a character. Bit suddenly, bam, he becomes out of the blue a political figure. Both these identities should have been better balanced.