Beppo: A Venetian Story

by Lord Byron

Excerpt: And gaiety on restless tiptoe hovers, Giggling with all the gallants who beset her; And there are songs and quavers, roaring, humming.

About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Romanticism, Fiction

58 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1818

About the author

George Gordon Byron (invariably known as Lord Byron), later Noel, 6th Baron Byron of Rochdale FRS was a British poet and a leading figure in Romanticism. Amongst Byron's best-known works are the brief poems She Walks in Beauty, When We Two Parted, and So, we'll go no more a roving, in addition to the narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. He is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains widely read and influential, both in the English-speaking world and beyond.

Byron's notabilty rests not only on his writings but also on his life, which featured upper-class living, numerous love affairs, debts, and separation. He was notably described by Lady Caroline Lamb as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know". Byron served as a regional leader of Italy's revolutionary organization, the Carbonari, in its struggle against Austria. He later travelled to fight against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero. He died from a fever contracted while in Messolonghi in Greece.

Reviews

[Shelly]

There are few things I love more than Sassy Lord Byron! I love seeing him make fun of Southey, and take jabs at his exwife. It's like Real Housewives of the 1800s... God bless it! Beppo read like an early Don Juan, the reader can definitely sense the fresh wounds of his exile from England. This is one of Byron's many "I'll get the last laugh" satiric poems. If you haven't read Beppo, you should probably get on that.

[Dsqueenie]

Beppo doesn't have a Childe Harold moment where your emotions and the verse sing out in harmony, the words appearing almost grotesquely in your minds eye and capturing your imagination. Beppo is - despite not being that short - quite simple.

It's about a woman (who he decides to call Laura on a whim) whose husband disappears at sea. She takes a cultured Count as a "vice husband" and then one night her husband reappears. Lord Byron doesn't elaborate much more than than that. The length comes from his many digressions.

Apart from Laura Byron speaks about the English climate, "chilly" English women, how verse is more fashionable than prose and The Regent. If we as readers weren't already interested in the great Lord Byron's opinions these sections would be boring.

Beppo is good because Byron is a talented writer. Beppo written by any other writer would be considered simple and a bit, for lack of a better word, baggy.

[Anastasia]

2.5
What was that about?

[Esmay]

3,5 Stars!

[Mike Blackwell]

A nice bit of narrative verse that is more often about digressions than it is about the story being told. I found it charming. Gets me rearin' and roarin' to read Don Juan

[Flavia]

"I love the language, that soft bastard Latin,
Which melts like kisses from a female mouth,
And sounds as if it should be writ on satin,
With syllables which breathe of the sweet South"

Molto più interessanti le sue digressioni su Venezia, che la vicenda in sé.

[Felix]

Padding out the stats.

[Carlos Cristoforone]

Un embole enredado. La historia se resume en 1 pagina.

[Kira]

Not one of my favorites by Lord Byron, but one that is still excellent

[Laura Wood]

Short and sweet. This is the first Byron work that I’ve read and I will definitely be reading more.

Also, the main character having the same name as me didn’t hurt.

[Lindsey]

Very quirky. I bought it in Venice and it was fun to read after visiting there.

[Ju Ribeiro]

My first "real" Byron. Loved to read it - flows with pleasure.

[Débora]

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