"Obscured by the freedom fighter, fashion leader, fallen angel, and literary bad boy, Byron the great poet has tended to be forgotten," writes Benita Eisler in the closing chapter of her monumental biography, which goes a long way toward depicting George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) in a more balanced fashion. Even in his own era, when the first edition of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage sold out in three days, whispers of incest, homosexuality, and--far worse in Tory England--political radicalism grew so insistent that they drove Byron out of his homeland. Eisler's comprehensive narrative does ample justice to the impassioned love affairs that made him notorious, from his voluptuous half-sister, Augusta Leigh, to the erratic and vengeful Lady Caroline Lamb, who famously described him as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." Let's face it, those juicy stories are half the reason we want to read about Byron, but Eisler gives us the other half, too, reminding her readers with lengthy quotes and intelligent exegesis that Don Juan is one of the greatest poems in English, and Byron one of the most influential and important poets. Her impeccably researched text is lucid about Byron's beliefs, candid about his faults, and persuasively ardent about his genius. --Wendy Smith
From Publishers Weekly
On May 17, 1824, one month after George Gordon Lord Byron (b. 1788) caught fever in a Missolonghi rainstorm while fighting for the liberation of Greece, the cautious publisher John Murray, with the blessing of Byron's ex-wife, Annabella, and his beloved half-sister, Augusta, took a match to an unpublished work by the famous poetAthe two-volume manuscript that was his memoirs. Perhaps it was this act that opened the flue for Byron biography, for as more and more of the seamy details of the poet's highly dissolute life come to light, the abiding hope remains that the destroyed work contained still more. Eisler's (O'Keeffe and Stieglitz: An American Romance) exhaustive biography portrays Byron as a restless, brilliant man in thrall: he is, in her view, the puppet of his own extravagant passions and even in his lifetime was so fictionalized and mythologized by others that he found it hard to maintain his own sense of self. Whereas Phyllis Grosskurth's study of two years ago, Byron: The Flawed Angel, used psychoanalytic arguments to show the poet's state of mind and possible manic depression, Eisler is more interested in the interaction between his amorous attachments and his poems. She quotes from his oeuvre liberally and with the good timing of an able literary critic, as she details the romances of the great Romantic, from his childhood crushes, through secret schoolboy encounters, affairs with other men and with the society belles and salonistes like the Ladies Oxford and Lamb, his marriage to Annabella, his incest with Augusta, dalliances with countless other women he would ultimately spurn, and his final, protracted involvement with Teresa Guiccioli. There are moments when Eisler's tight rein on her prose slackens to clich?, as when, having described so many of the beauties Byron bedded, Teresa is given the proverbial "little white teeth like perfectly matched pearls." But in the main, Eisler's lusty enjoyment of her subject's many escapades animates the story she tells in words both elegant and provocative. The mind-boggling array of quotations, excerpts, and eyewitness and historical accounts she has amassed give face and flesh not only to the poet born under a bad, bright star, but to those whose lives he illuminated briefly. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
If Byron learned poetry from Pope and the classical poets, he learned wickedness from his father, the drunken, incestuous Mad Jack Byron, who died penniless at 36. And although there is no doubt that the poet himself sought "moral suicide," it is also true that his energies were ethereal as well as diabolicAif he was adept at ruining the happiness of others, he was also capable of writing some of the most sublime poetry of his time and ours. With a life like his, the biographer need only stand aside, which Eisler does, for the most part; she psychologizes occasionally but unnecessarily, since Byron hid nothing in his quest to become the hero of his own life. Ultimately, that life upstaged the poetry, as Eisler (author of O'Keeffe and Stieglitz: An American Romance, LJ 4/15/91) notes toward the end of this thoroughly engaging study. Byron too died when he was only 36, and his autopsy report noted many signs of disease, including the fact that, "strangest of all, the sutures of the skull had fused together, a sign of immense age." Eisler pays ample attention to Byron's work, making this an excellent complement to Grosskurth's purely biographical Byron (LJ 4/15/97). Highly recommended.ADavid Kirby, Florida State Univ., TallahasseeCopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The New York Times Book Review, Claude Rawson
This book astutely identifies links between Byron's defiance of prevailing moral codes and his political radicalism, distinguishing him from Rousseau and from his fellow patrician Shelley...
The Atlantic Monthly, Phoebe Lou Adams
This is a splendidly readable biography of a perpetually fascinating genius.
From Kirkus Reviews
This new life of the 19th-century's most notorious literary celebrity successfully revivifies the poet for our timesalbeit not without applying a few shocks. Eisler (O'Keefe and Stieglitz: An American Romance, 1991, etc.) has found in Byron a subject well-fitted to her ability to take frank measure of transgression. In an effective opening vignette, Eisler recreates the contentious scene, after his untimely death at war with revolutionaries in Greece, when Byron's associates in England collectively burned his shocking memoirs. Then, as if reconstituting those lost recollections, Eisler reconstructs his experiences, however sensational, as closely as possiblewithout, however, overindulging in speculation of the ``he must have felt'' variety. While she ably handles Byron's erotically charged youth and school days, the author comes into her own when handling the heart of his story: his sexual affairsincluding the notorious liaison with his own half-sisterconducted in Regency London and then in Italian exile; his travels in Greece, the Levant, and Europe with the Shelleys and others; and above all, his ambitious poetic productions, which would transfix all Europe. In part through close readings of his verses, Eisler captures the urgency of his homosexual loves and the viciousness with which he turned on his wife. While Eisler occasionally crosses the line into the lurid, her reporting, rendered in beautiful prose, seems accurate, even when she argues that Byron, himself molested as a child, molested children in turn. It helps that she also emphasizes Byron's wider sensualityexploring his shame over his lameness, his weight issues, and his compulsive athleticismand the absurdly complex money issues that dogged him. In such contexts, Byron's wild sexual adventures seem only a part of a lifestyle that was so far ahead of its time as to be not just modern, but perhaps even postmodern. Occasional local crimes of sensationalism, then, contribute to the singular virtue of this volume: it's the rare doorstop of a literary biography that's also a legitimate page-turner. (16 pages photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"Quite simply the best life of Byron we have." --Literary Review
"Lively. . .vividly told. . . . A much more detailed and illuminating account of the poet's private life than any previous book." --The Washington Post Book World
"A splendidly readable biography of a perpetually fascinating genius." --The Atlantic Monthly
"[Eisler's ] book will . . . be the one to beat for many decades to come.
. . . [She] is especially artful and dexterous in matching the poetry to the life and the ideas." --Los Angeles Times
Review
"Quite simply the best life of Byron we have." --Literary Review
"Lively. . .vividly told. . . . A much more detailed and illuminating account of the poet's private life than any previous book." --The Washington Post Book World
"A splendidly readable biography of a perpetually fascinating genius." --The Atlantic Monthly
"[Eisler's ] book will . . . be the one to beat for many decades to come.
. . . [She] is especially artful and dexterous in matching the poetry to the life and the ideas." --Los Angeles Times
Book Description
In this masterful portrait of the poet who dazzled an era and prefigured the modern age of celebrity, noted biographer Benita Eisler offers a fuller and more complex vision than we have yet been afforded of George Gordon, Lord Byron.
Eisler reexamines his poetic achievement in the context of his extraordinary life: the shameful and traumatic childhood; the swashbuckling adventures in the East; the instant stardom achieved with the publication ofChilde Harold's Pilgrimage; his passionate and destructive love affairs, including an incestuous liaison with his half-sister; and finally his tragic death in the cause of Greek independence. This magnificent record of a towering figure is sure to become the new standard biography of Byron.
From the Inside Flap
In this masterful portrait of the poet who dazzled an era and prefigured the modern age of celebrity, noted biographer Benita Eisler offers a fuller and more complex vision than we have yet been afforded of George Gordon, Lord Byron.
Eisler reexamines his poetic achievement in the context of his extraordinary life: the shameful and traumatic childhood; the swashbuckling adventures in the East; the instant stardom achieved with the publication ofChilde Harold's Pilgrimage; his passionate and destructive love affairs, including an incestuous liaison with his half-sister; and finally his tragic death in the cause of Greek independence. This magnificent record of a towering figure is sure to become the new standard biography of Byron.
From the Back Cover
"Quite simply the best life of Byron we have." --Literary Review
"Lively. . .vividly told. . . . A much more detailed and illuminating account of the poet's private life than any previous book."--The Washington Post Book World
"A splendidly readable biography of a perpetually fascinating genius."--The Atlantic Monthly
"[Eisler's ] book will . . . be the one to beat for many decades to come.
. . . [She] is especially artful and dexterous in matching the poetry to the life and the ideas." --Los Angeles Times
About the Author
Benita Eisler lives in New York City.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From Chapter One
"Shades of the Dead! Have I Not Heard Your Voices?"
On Monday, May 17, 1824, near noon, six men gathered in the high-ceilinged drawing room at 50 Albemarle Street, off Piccadilly, in a house that served as both home and office to the publisher John Murray. For days the group had been quarreling among themselves. Alliances shifted. Messages flew back and forth, and meetings between pairs continued through the morning. Once they were finally assembled, an argument flared between two of their number, John Cam Hobhouse, a rising young parliamentarian from a wealthy Bristol family, and Thomas Moore, a Dublin-born poet and grocer's son. Angry words threatened to turn into physical violence. Finally, the decision of the host prevailed, and calm was restored. Murray then asked his sixteen-year-old son to join them. Introduced as heir to his father's business, the boy was invited to witness a momentous event. A servant appeared, carrying two bound manuscript volumes. While the group drew closer to the fire blazing in the grate, two others, Wilmot Horton and Colonel Doyle, took the books and, tearing them apart, fed the pages, covered with handwriting familiar to all those present, to the crackling flames. Within minutes, the memoirs of George Gordon, sixth Lord Byron, were reduced to a mound of ashes.
Byron had been dead for one month to the day. The ship carrying the poet's embalmed body (vital organs removed and packed separately) had taken four weeks to sail from Greece to England. In the interval, furious debates had exposed enmities old and new among those who were to be present at the burning of the manuscript. Quarreling had flared over the ownership of the manuscript, intensifying with arguments about potential damage to the poet's already seamy reputation and the pain his unexpurgated memories would cause his former wife, their daughter, and his half sister. Each of the six men had his own stake in the dispute. John Cam Hobhouse, a Whig M.P. and Byron's executor and oldest friend, wanted only to sanitize the poet's name for posterity. In the last years of his life, Byron had given his memoirs to his fellow poet Tom Moore. The needy Moore had, with Byron's approval, promptly sold the copyright to Murray. Then, at the burning, he tried to save the manuscript. But it was too late. Finally, Horton and Doyle, the two responsible for the actual destruction of the volumes, represented the interests of Lady Byron, the poet's estranged wife and the mother of his child, and his half sister, Augusta Leigh, respectively.
"The most timid of God's booksellers," Byron had once called Murray, his publisher and now enthusiastic host of the auto-da-fe. Still, the decision to destroy the most personal words of his best-selling author (which, in the event, Murray had not even read), weighed against the enormous profit potential of publishing the memoirs, underlines the fear that the known facts of Byron's life inspired in those who loved him--and their horror of revelations yet unknown.
Byron's fame as a poet and his notoriety as a man were one; the scandals of his life--whoring, marriage, adultery, incest, sodomy--became the text or subtext of his poems, made more shocking by the poet's cynicism shading into blasphemy. The heroes of the poems might be pirates or princes, but Byron's voice--the passionate sorrowing youth turned world-weary libertine--made his works instant best-sellers. Editions of his first advertisement for himself, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, sold out within three days. And this was not even the most frankly autobiographical of Byron's works. Penned from self-imposed exile in Italy, published in eagerly awaited installments, Don Juan delighted London gossipmongers with plentiful allusions to the scandal surrounding the poet's divorce from his young wife of one year and his subsequent flight from English "hypocrisy and cant." In the few years left to him, Byron added the glamour of revolutionary politics to his erotic and literary engagements. In exile, he joined the underground secret society called the Carbonari in the struggle to rid Italy of the Austrians, before dying at Missolonghi, bled to death by his doctors, while training troops for the liberation of Greece. Mourned throughout the world, the poet would not have shared the belief that his end was untimely. He had lived so hard and fast, he said, that before his death at age thirty-six, he felt himself to be an old man.
Indeed, the brief arc of his life spanned an era whose turbulence mirrored the poet's own stormy existence. In 1788, the year of Byron's birth, George III succumbed to the first attack of madness, the violent symptoms of which required the appointment of his oldest son, the Prince of Wales, as Regent. The King regained his reason the following year and resumed power, but already the high living "Prinnie" and his dissolute friends had changed the tone of the court. Twenty years before he was officially declared Prince Regent, George Frederick Augustus of Hanover's indulgences in food, drink, gambling, and women, along with more durable interests in architecture and decor, ushered in the glittering froth of brilliance, luxury, and vice we know as the Regency. Its sensibility--at once restless, sensual, melancholy, and exuberant--might be characterized by a term invented a hundred years later to describe a strangely similar spirit: fin-de-siecle.
In 1789, the year after Byron was born, the French Revolution fired the dreams--and fueled the nightmares--of all Europe. Its bloody overthrow of the old order was the crucial event that continued to haunt Byron's generation, shaping his choice of heroes and villains among his elders. Charles James Fox, the leader of the radical Whig opposition and the idol of Byron's youth, had declared the fall of the Bastille "the greatest and best event in the history of the world." For the Tory government, however, in power for most of Byron's lifetime, the French Revolution gave legitimacy to the politics of reaction. The excesses of the Terror turned fiery young republican sympathizers among the first generation of Romantic poets, notably Wordsworth and Southey, into middle-aged monarchists, reviled by Byron as turncoat opportunists.
Fear of revolutionary contagion provided the excuse for repressive measures; in 1794 habeas corpus was suspended, the first in a series of acts amputating the civil rights of Englishmen. Censorship and spying became the order of the day; any form of association, especially among the dispossessed, could be prosecuted as a crime. Starting in 1793, when the Girondist government declared war on England, patriotism was invoked to justify further curtailing of individual freedoms. The political reality that permitted the Regency to waltz on unafraid was that England had become a police state. Byron, the newly crowned king of London drawing rooms in 1814, saw clearly that as a poet who was also a satirist and social critic, as a peer who spoke out for the rights of starving weavers or Irish Catholics, he would not long be indulged for his youth, talent, and title.
War with France began when Byron was five years old; it would continue until 1815, when he was twenty-seven. Like that of other ardent youths throughout Europe, the poet's political consciousness was shaped by an idealized image of Napoleon as the personification of heroic conquest in the name of republican principles. Besides, for the adolescent rebel, Tory England's demonized enemy was a natural ally. Less consciously, Byron absorbed another Napoleonic lesson: The little corporal who declared himself Emperor was the herald of a new era, the age of the self-made man.
In England, too, this new breed was increasingly prominent. The war with France had galvanized a sluggish economy, ushering in the first phase of the Industrial Revolution, which would change the face of England. The first of England's dark satanic mills helped to float the Regency extravaganza. While the poor suffered more, a new class of entrepreneur-inventors--ironmasters and coal barons, pottery manufacturers and bankers--rode to dazzling fortunes. Their sons, like the two brilliant Peel brothers (one of whom became Prime Minister), were among Lord Byron's few commoner classmates at Harrow. And there would be more. Great landowning grandees were still the most visible stars on the brilliant stage of the Regency, but new money and talent were joining the featured players.
It was a febrile age. Social, political, and cultural certainties were shifting, like tectonic plates, under the feet of young men starting out in life. Mobility, then as now, had its price. The pressures of public life destroyed individuals as never before. Between 1790 and 1820, nineteen members of Parliament committed suicide and twenty others went mad; two of those who took their own lives, Sir Samuel Romilly and Sir Samuel Whitbread, were closely associated with Byron. "In every class there is the same taut neurotic quality," the historian J. H. Plumb observed, "the fantastic gambling and drinking, the riots, brutality and violence, and everywhere and always a constant sense of death."
Byron was a child of his age and subject to all its fissures. The great Regency portraitist Sir Thomas Lawrence met the poet only once, but where others found simply beauty, the painter saw all the conflicts of Byron's character: "its keen and rapid genius, its pale intelligence, its profligacy, and its bitterness; its original symmetry distorted by the passions, his laugh of mingled merriment and scorn; the forehead clear and open, the brow boldly prominent, the eyes bright and dissimilar, the nose finely cut, and the nostril acutely formed; the mouth well made, but wide and contemptuous even in its smile, falling singularly at the corners, and its vindictive and disdainful expression heightened by the massive firmness of the chin, which springs at once from the centre of the full under-lip; the hair dark and curling but irregular in its growth; all this presents to you the poet and the man; and the general effect is heightened by a thin spare form, and, as you may have heard, by a deformity of limb."
Heir to instability, Byron clung to the certainty of inherited land and ancient title, even as he vowed to seize the rewards of talent and energy.
"The way to riches, to Greatness, lies before me," Byron wrote to his mother at age fifteen. "I can, I will cut myself a path through the world or perish."
Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame FROM THE PUBLISHER
Drawing on previously unavailable material - including family papers only recently brought to light - Eisler offers us a more complex vision of Byron than any we've had before: a man who rose from the depths of poverty and the humiliation of childhood lameness to a pinnacle of success and fame unlike anything the world had ever seen, and whose bravura identity as renegade aristocrat, political revolutionary, mythic lover, and Romanticism's galvanizing hero and antihero was surpassed in brilliance only by his poetic genius. Here also are the first in-depth portraits of the women - and men - Byron loved: his guilty relations with John Edleston, a young Cambridge chorister; his tempestuous affair with Lady Caroline Lamb, who was driven to madness by her love for him; his catastrophic marriage to the lovely Annabella Milbanke; his passionate incestuous relationship with his half sister, Augusta, and the tormented menage a trois they shared with his young wife; and the gentler love of his later life, Teresa Guiccioli, whom he abandoned for his life's last adventure in Missolonghi. Throughout, Eisler offers incisive analysis of Byron's poetry in the context of his extraordinary life - as hero and martyr, aristocratic aesthete and dandy, transgressive rebel fueled by forbidden substances and exiled for forbidden passions - examining in detail the stanzas that inspired his own and succeeding generations as no other writer has since Shakespeare.
FROM THE CRITICS
Claude Rawson
Being a lord was more important than being a writer, as Benita Eisler points out...in this lively biography....Eisler's account of Byron's appalling marriage and its termination is a page-turner....This book astutely identifies links between Byron's defiance of prevailing moral codes and his poilitical radicalism... —The New York Times Book Review
Library Journal
If Byron learned poetry from Pope and the classical poets, he learned wickedness from his father, the drunken, incestuous Mad Jack Byron, who died penniless at 36. And although there is no doubt that the poet himself sought "moral suicide," it is also true that his energies were ethereal as well as diabolic--if he was adept at ruining the happiness of others, he was also capable of writing some of the most sublime poetry of his time and ours. With a life like his, the biographer need only stand aside, which Eisler does, for the most part; she psychologizes occasionally but unnecessarily, since Byron hid nothing in his quest to become the hero of his own life. Ultimately, that life upstaged the poetry, as Eisler (author of O'Keeffe and Stieglitz: An American Romance, LJ 4/15/91) notes toward the end of this thoroughly engaging study. Byron too died when he was only 36, and his autopsy report noted many signs of disease, including the fact that, "strangest of all, the sutures of the skull had fused together, a sign of immense age." Eisler pays ample attention to Byron's work, making this an excellent complement to Grosskurth's purely biographical Byron (LJ 4/15/97). Highly recommended.--David Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee
Booknews
Drawing on previously unavailable material, the author offers a complex vision of the poet who dazzled an era and prefigured the modern age of celebrity. She captures the passions and obsessions that consumed Byron, the fierce devotions and the outsized ego that fired his work, and the despair and self-loathing that plagued his short life. She reveals the almost vengeful determination with which Byron recast himself as the elegant figure who drew sensation to him like a cloak until his death, alone and in exile, at the age of 36, and she includes in-depth portraits of the women and men Byron loved. Contains several b&w photographs. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknew.com)
Claude Rawson - The New York Times Book Review
Being a lord was more important than being a writer, as Benita Eisler points out...in this lively biography....Eisler's account of Byron's appalling marriage and its termination is a page-turner....This book astutely identifies links between Byron's defiance of prevailing moral codes and his poilitical radicalism...
Kirkus Reviews
This new life of the 19th-century's most notorious literary celebrity successfully revivifies the poet for our times—albeit not without applying a few shocks. Eisler (O'Keefe and Stieglitz: An American Romance, 1991, etc.) has found in Byron a subject well-fitted to her ability to take frank measure of transgression. In an effective opening vignette, Eisler recreates the contentious scene, after his untimely death at war with revolutionaries in Greece, when Byron's associates in England collectively burned his shocking memoirs. Then, as if reconstituting those lost recollections, Eisler reconstructs his experiences, however sensational, as closely as possible—without, however, overindulging in speculation of the "he must have felt" variety. While she ably handles Byron's erotically charged youth and school days, the author comes into her own when handling the heart of his story: his sexual affairs—including the notorious liaison with his own half-sister—conducted in Regency London and then in Italian exile; his travels in Greece, the Levant, and Europe with the Shelleys and others; and above all, his ambitious poetic productions, which would transfix all Europe. In part through close readings of his verses, Eisler captures the urgency of his homosexual loves and the viciousness with which he turned on his wife. While Eisler occasionally crosses the line into the lurid, her reporting, rendered in beautiful prose, seems accurate, even when she argues that Byron, himself molested as a child, molested children in turn. It helps that she also emphasizes Byron's wider sensuality—exploring his shame over his lameness, his weight issues, and his compulsiveathleticism—and the absurdly complex money issues that dogged him. In such contexts, Byron's wild sexual adventures seem only a part of a lifestyle that was so far ahead of its time as to be not just modern, but perhaps even postmodern. Occasional local crimes of sensationalism, then, contribute to the singular virtue of this volume: it's the rare doorstop of a literary biography that's also a legitimate page-turner. (16 pages photos, not seen)
Art & Photography
Book Info
