Review by Choice Review
By the end of the 19th century, one could find more published biographies of Lord Byron (1788-1824) than of all the major English Romantic poets combined--and the flood continues. When he died at the age of 36, his fame was exceeded only by Napoleon's. This astonishing fame was based on a unique combination of qualities. He was a lord of the realm from the age of ten, strikingly handsome, and a hugely gifted poet. He also had a voracious sexual appetite, for both sexes, a fact that became known only in the past half century. The title of the present book is misleading: Byron was rarely in love, as that term is normally understood. Though this biography is well written and researched, O'Brien has almost nothing to say about her subject's poetry or brilliant prose. Instead she looks at the British aristocratic society in which Byron moved, presenting it almost as an enormous brothel. To follow Byron's erotic escapades, despite his syphilis and gonorrhea, from England to Italy to Greece, where he died, has, of course, its own prurient interest, but with biographies of Byron crowding library shelves, this is an unnecessary purchase. Summing Up: Not recommended. N. Fruman emeritus, University of Minnesota
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
THANK the gods of literature that George Gordon, Lord Byron, was born in 1788, well out of the reach of psychopharmacology. "Byron in Love," the Irish novelist Edna O'Brien's compact and mischievously complicit biography of the great Romantic poet and enfant terrible, skates over its subject's literary career to showcase the dissolute behavior Byron's critics decried as that of a "second Caligula." Arguably, Caligula was the more moderate soul. Even the Byronic hero falls short of his inspiration. Emily Brontë's Heathcliff and her sister Charlotte's Mr. Rochester are both pale pretenders to a character no writer could invent. The rapacious trajectory of the poet's appetite for sex and celebrity makes him a poster boy for what his contemporary and countryman Dr. J. C. Prichard termed "moral insanity" - a disease of the passions that left the intellect intact while "the individual is . . . incapable . . . of conducting himself with decency and propriety in the business of life." Today, we'd dismiss Byron as a bipolar sex addict whose unresolved Oedipal conflict held him in thrall to the father he never knew. If lithium wouldn't have poisoned the mania - and the poetry - out of him, how about Abilify with a chaser of Luvox? "His beginning," O'Brien narrates drily, "was not propitious" - a mother who was destitute, "quick-tempered and capricious"; a father in exile to escape debt; and the stigma of a club foot. A ready-made "symbol of castration," Byron's deformed right limb would provoke such overcompensation that his verses were eclipsed by his sexual exploits. By the time he embarked, at age 27, on what O'Brien calls "the most public marriage of any poet," he had fathered a child with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. In what reads like a helpless, hapless, even slapstick collapse in the face of reason, he orchestrated one after another imbroglio in which his bride, Annabella Milbanke, was forced to endure the company of his incestuous lover and their infant daughter (who, he was relieved to report, did not betray her unnatural conception by being "born an ape"). Annabella, who resisted Byron's epistolary courtship for two years, declaring she would not "enter into a family where there is a strong tendency to Insanity," seems to have succumbed to a tragic if unoriginal conceit, imagining she might with effort change her husband's profligate nature. As for Byron, he was in it for the money. Exacerbated by her morally superior stance, his disappointment at discovering that her dowry, as O'Brien nicely puts it, was "more theoretical than actual" fueled a savage spree of persecution. O'Brien sets the stage for her readers' amusement rather than censure. "Their wedding night had," she notes, "its literary correlation in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, a crimson curtain catching fire, a hallucinating bridegroom believing he was in hell, then pacing the long ghostly gallery with his loaded pistols." The ensuing scenes might be more purely and deliciously farcical (or one would feel less guilty for enjoying their ghastliness) had Byron not been so unrepentantly cruel to his wife. As it was, he forced the increasingly hysterical Annabella to listen as Augusta read aloud from letters proving he had never loved the woman he deigned to marry. After that prelude, Annabella was sent off to the abandoned connubial bower while he remained with Augusta. Cruelty seems to have been a cornerstone of Byron's personality, a wretched and gleeful sadism born of self-loathing. "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" - the first two cantos, published in 1812, constituted a general invitation to his polysexual coming-out party - was clearly autobiographical, and Byron called its hero a "repulsive personage." PERHAPS ennui was unavoidable for the youth who became the sixth Lord Byron at the age of 10. The only male among his cousins, he was spoiled by his aunts and great-aunts, indulged in selfishness rather than taught to temper his passions. Installed at Newstead Abbey, his crumbling ancestral home, the boy carried loaded pistols in his waistcoat pocket and discharged them whenever he pleased, indoors or out, satisfying a taste for gothic excess that would later inspire him to use human skulls as drinking vessels and travel with a menagerie that included peacocks, monkeys and birds of prey. The bullying his lame foot occasioned at Harrow inspired a lifelong cultivation of his physique and strengthened his disdain for convention. Enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1805 (where he kept a bear as a pet), Byron demonstrated a flamboyance and disregard for authority that won him boundless attention. His ability to attach people to him, his friend John Hobhouse observed, was magical, engendering a popularity that allowed him to plunge, O'Brien remarks, into an "abyss of sensuality." At 17, he embarked on the kind of affair with a choirboy that was "punishable by hanging" and later considered marrying a young prostitute whose charms held him hostage for a "week or so." By 1809 he'd set sail under Captain Kidd on the young nobleman's obligatory grand tour, during which he acquired the background for his poetry, as well as syphilis - and, having "outlived" all his appetites, as he wrote in his journal, the conviction that "at 23 the best of life is over." What followed would be redux, but having committed herself to "follow him in his Rake's Progress," O'Brien does just that. Until his death at 36, Byron continued a course of sybaritic abandon, traveling with an entourage bewitched by his escapades and terrified by his mood swings and violent temper. "You know that all my loves go crazy - and make scenes," he wrote to Augusta in 1821, unable to draw a distinction between himself and the type of paramour he attracted. His autopsy, performed where he died, in Greece, bore witness to the toll his passions had exacted from his flesh - heart grossly enlarged, liver cirrhotic. In London, where his body was returned for burial, a barrier had to be erected around his casket to protect it from the throngs of mourners. It was the greatest display of what came to be called Byromania, but hardly the last. Kathryn Harrison writes fiction and nonfiction. Among her books is a biography, "Saint Thérèse of Lisieux."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Celebrated novelist and biographer O'Brien (The Country Girls trilogy) is a keen cicerone to the strange and insatiable love life of "the lame poet with the features of Adonis." Drawing on Marchand's three-volume biography of Lord Byron, while adding to this her immersion in letters and journals, O'Brien presents a figure we can see all-around. With a perennial worry about his weight, not to mention his right clubfoot, Byron, O'Brien says, compensated by indulging in homosexual relationships, most notably with John Edleston, and heterosexual trysts. Indeed, Byron always seemed to be in love and on the run, traversing Europe from Spain and Portugal to Albania and Greece. His travels and his loves inspired Manfred, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and, above all, Don Juan. Of interest as well are Byron's hot-and-cold relations with publisher John Murray, the Shelleys (who were largely appalled by Byron's lifestyle) and Dr. Polidori, whose novel on "the vampyre" would inspire an industry. At times a bit breathless, this compact life sets the emotional background for a poet who today is more famous for his life story than his work. 8 pages of illus. (June 15) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
O'Brien, best known for her stories and novels exploring the condition of women in male-dominated societies (e.g., The Light of Evening; The House of Splendid Isolation), was, perhaps unsurprisingly, "immediately drawn to" Byron. For this biography, she "immersed [her]self in the miraculous tomes of his letters and journals" in order to follow the man on his journey through love and his brief life. Certainly, she has written an accessible account of the famous poet's life, though it is more of a biography on the level of secondary school-aged readers than a scholarly work. Considering the thousands of available works on the life and writings of Byron, libraries with literature collections would be happier with Benita Eisler's Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame or Leslie A. Marchand's Byron and Byron: A Portrait. For libraries interested in Byron's correspondence, Andrew Nicholson's The Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron would be a better bet. Worth considering for public and secondary school libraries; optional for academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/09.]-Felicity D. Walsh, Emory Univ., Decatur, GA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A concise, humorous analysis of Lord Byron as archetypal lover and "embodiment of Everyman." Novelist O'Brien (The Light of Evening, 2006, etc.) revels in describing the excesses of the poet's larger-than-life personality. The precocious George Gordon Byron (17881824) was translating Horace at the age of six, read the entire Old Testament before he was eight and went on to attend Harrow and Cambridge. From an early age he assumed a hedonistic, profligate approach to life that unceasingly attracted both men and women. His early loves included the Earl of Clare at Harrow ("a love interrupted only by distancehe could never hear the word 'Clare' without a murmur of the heart"), Mary Chaworth back home during vacations and the "chiselled and beautiful" choirboy at Cambridge, John Edleston, in whose memory Byron wrote "Thryza," a series of elegies that disguised the subject's gender. O'Brien contends that Byron's continual need to be in love is what propelled his creative genius, allowing him to create the bawdy yet erudite poems "Don Juan" and "Childe Harold," which he composed while traveling through Greece and Turkey. Remarkable amorous conquests followed Byron's successa swooning, hysterical Caroline Lamb, who stalked Byron once he broke off their relationship; Lady Frances, who Byron seduced in full view of her husband; and his half sister Augusta Leigh, with whom he could not desist from an incestuous love, and which led to his shaming and exile from England. All are described in delicious detail by O'Brien. The key architect of Byron's public infamy was Annabella Milbanke, the fastidious heiress who married Byron to find herself in a love triangle with Augusta. Once separated, she made it her life's mission to destroy his name. Byron sought respite in Italy, finding more lovers, including Countess Teresa Guiccioli, his muse for "Don Juan." He died at the age of 36, amid a "deathbed scene that many an artist would have paintedbut only Rembrandt would have caught the fear and bewilderment in the eyes of those onlookers, all of whom venerated Byron but in their zeal and their helplessness differed as to what could or should be done." An apt rendering of the life of a charismatic man whose smile Coleridge compared to "the opening of the gate of Heaven." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
