36 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Less Than One Star, But I Can't Put That, Apparently, August 14, 2005
This review is from: Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame (Vintage) (Paperback)
Please do not buy this book. As an academic whose specialty area is Lord Byron, I urge you to avoid this sensationalist and poorly written work at all costs. It is, aside from anything else, full of small mistakes regarding dates, etc. If you are looking for a reliable recent biography of Byron, buy the Fiona Macarthy book before you buy this one. If you are willing to spend more and hunt more, and don't mind a book that, because of the time when it was written, scants the issue of Byron's complex sexual tastes, the undoubted go-to bio is Leslie Marchand's three volume work from 1957. Old, but still the best.
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28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Preciously Byronic, February 21, 2003
This review is from: Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame (Vintage) (Paperback)
To begin with, the more exacting reviewers are correct in their assertions that there is nothing new here, aside from Eisler's "spin" on previously well-known facts about the infamous and lionized Poet and Lord. This book is definitely NOT for those interested in a thorough, searching delve into Byron and his poetry. But, moreover, it is not even the "page-turner" which other reviewers make it out to be.
The book is written in this precious, cozy, semi-academese which drains the blood from the writing. There is no evaluation of the poet in the context in the particular developmental stage of English poetry at the time. And Shelley, in particular, gets a particularly curt dismissal.---But the real problem with this biography is not that Eisler is dismissive of other (in Shelley's case, better) poets or that her book is simply a rehashing of previously known circumstances. The problem is her plodding, lifeless, cutesy writing style. By the end of the book, one feels that Ms. Eisler has appropriated Byron into her cozy world of popularized, made-for-giant-publishing-houses beach-read bios. Has anyone else noticed that all the chapters are almost the exact number of pages in length? Such precise compartmentalization does not for the reflection of a life make, in particular Byron's!
The one merit this book indisbutably does have is to make you want to read or reread Byron's poetry. Eisler's citations of neatly culled snippets are the only lively thing in the book! So, after you've read all about the minutiae of the poet's life and feel drained and off-put at the end:
Close thy Eisler! Open thy Byron!
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Generally good; a fun summer read., May 11, 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame (Vintage) (Paperback)
I became interested in Byron after reading a brief biography of the poet in a women's magazine which mentioned, among other things, the shocking fact that Byron had indulged in incest with his half-sister and fathered a child by her. Could this, I wondered, be true? And if so, why had none of my English teachers bothered to mention this titillating detail (there being no better way to motivate kids to read than by sharing prurient, violent, or otherwise scandalous of disgusting tidbits with them)?
Fortunately for me, my step-mother is a scholar of Byron, and, on hearing of my interest, she promptly sent me Eisler's biography of Byron, which, weighing in at over 800 pages, promised to satisfy my need for prurience in spades.
As it turns out, I did enjoy Eisler's biography and the portrait that she paints of the poet, his contemporaries, and his travels. Byron's reputation as a literary bad-boy seems to have been richly deserved. Eisler chronicles his early homosexual interests, his penchant for getting low-class servants and prostitutes pregnant, his cynical association with a society maven a la Les Liasons Dangereuses which resulted in his catastrophic marriage to an innocent, upright, and deeply religious young woman, his affair with his sister, and (when social outrage threatened to make things uncomfortable for him) his eventual flight from England, leaving his sister and their infant daughter to bear the stigma and to withstand the scorn of society alone.
Eisler mixes this tale of profligate erotic dalliance with serious consideration of the literary development of the poet, from his first forays into verse as a boy to his final production of masterpieces such as Don Juan. She also weaves into her story details of the pressing financial problems which faced the impoverished (and irresponsible) young peer and analysis of the effect of Byron's physical problems (a club foot and a life-long tendency to being overweight) on his growth as a man and an artist.
Yet there are also weaknesses in Eisler's work, some of which may merely be the inevitable errors which creep into any lengthy work, but which nevertheless cause the reader some concern as to Eisler's judgement. Let me offer an example which requires a bit of background information: a) when writing letters it was common, in the early 19th century, to abbreviated words; b) Byron's ancestral home was Newstead Abbey; c) Byron liked, for reasons unclear, to call his girlfriends 'Antelope.' What should we then understand when Lady Caroline Lamb, one of Byron's lovers, writes: "you give us both up no ties can bind but Newstead A bears your unkindness in sullen silence"? While you, dear reader, might assume the word starting with A that Caroline abbreviated was "Abbey," Eisler thinks otherwise, filling in "Antelope" (albeit with a question mark indicating uncertainty). Try reading the sentence again and see which interpretation makes more sense.
There are other similar little slips scattered throughout the volume--not so many as to seriously damage the work, but enough to make the reader wonder about the care with which the manuscript was prepared. Other aspects of the book, too, leave room for improvement. Why, for instance, is a holograph letter reproduced at the end of the book but never (as far as I can tell) referred to in the text? Why is there no map to assist the reader in following Byron on his complicated travels throughout Europe and the East? Why do we learn so little about the Gothic movement by which Byron, evidently, was influenced? And could we not hear more of the reception of Byron's poems by his contemporaries?
These problems, however, are small in the grand scheme of things. Overall, through Eisler's work we can appreciate many different sides of Byron and of the fascination that he exercised on so many of those who met him. Perhaps the most flattering thing I can say about Eisler's work is that I found it compelling right to the end, and it has certainly inspired me to read more of Byron's verse.
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