Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame - Hardcover

Eisler, Benita

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679412999 ISBN 13: 9780679412991

Publisher: Knopf, 1999

Synopsis

Benita Eisler's Byron is a masterful portrait of the poet who dazzled an era and pre-figured the modern age of celebrity--an absorbing, illuminating, and wonderfully entertaining account of Lord Byron's spectacular life, monumental work, and lasting heroic legacy.

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.

With grace, erudition, and insight, Eisler 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. Eisler gives us a richly detailed drama of a childhood of abandonment and shame; of Byron's early days at Harrow and Cambridge; of his humiliating entry into the House of Lords at eighteen; of his adventures in the East, where he consorted with pashas and prostitutes; of his relationships with his contemporaries, among them the twenty-four-year-old Shelley and his wife, Mary; of the instant celebrity that attended the publication of the first cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; and of the almost vengeful determination with which Byron recast himself as the elegant figure that glided through Regency drawing rooms, plotted with Italian Carbonari, loved men and women, and drew sensation to him like a cloak until his death, alone and in exile, at the age of thirty-six.

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.

A magnificent record of a towering figure, sure to stand as the definitive biography for years to come.

About this title

Review

"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 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 this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0679412999
• ISBN 13: 9780679412991
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 864