Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life [Hardcover]

Edna O'Brien (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 15, 2009

From one of our greatest novelists comes this luminous portrait of the world’s first literary rock star.

Acclaimed biographer of James Joyce Edna O’Brien has written an intimate biography that suits her fiery and charismatic subject. She follows Byron from the dissipations of Regency London to the wilds of Albania and the Socratic pleasures of Greece and Turkey, culminating in his meteoric rise to fame at the age of twenty-four on the publication of Childe Harold. With her prismatic eye and novelistic style, O’Brien eerily captures the spirit of the man and creates an indelible portrait of Byron that explodes the Romantic myth. From his escapades with John Edleston, the fourteen-year-old Cambridge choir boy, to those with a galaxy of women that included his half-sister, his wife of one year, and the Italian countess who forsook her satyr-like husband for “the peer of England and its greatest poet,” Byron scandalized the world and inspires “Byronmania” to this day. Byron, as brilliantly rendered by O’Brien, is the poet as rebel, imaginative and lawless, and defiantly immortal.

8 pages of illustrations

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Celebrated novelist and biographer O'Brien (The Country Girls trilogy) is a keen cicerone to the strange and insatiable love life of œthe 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 œthe 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)
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From The New Yorker

In this jaunty biography, O’Brien eschews considerations of Byron’s poetry to examine his amorous adventures, offering her reader the kind of fabulous anecdotes that made the poet a celebrity throughout Europe. A string of volatile relationships, interrupted only by bouts of gonorrhea or the onset of “the poetry mania,” began with his mother, who liked to taunt him about his clubfoot before smothering him with kisses. Women (and sometimes men) found his “combination of genius and Satanism” irresistible and, often, maddening: one thwarted paramour sent him a lock of her pubic hair “tinged with blood” and burned him in effigy. Out of O’Brien’s kinetic recounting of scandal after scandal, a sense of the poet’s pathos emerges: Byron did, at times, love deeply. But by eliding his literary personality O’Brien risks voyeurism.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (June 15, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393070115
• ISBN-13: 978-0393070118
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #859,264 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Edna O'Brien, the author of "The Country Girls" Trilogy, "The Light of Evening," and "Byron in Love," is the recipient of the James Joyce Ulysses Medal, and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in London.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Why?, June 25, 2009

By 

Richard Masloski (New Windsor, New York USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life (Hardcover)

There is 1997's 400+ page BYRON:THE FLAWED ANGEL by Phyllis Grosskurth. There is 1999's colossal, almost 800 page BYRON: CHILD OF PASSION, FOOL OF FAME by Benita Eisler. And then there is 2002's almost 600 page BYRON: LIFE AND LEGEND by Fiona MacCarthy. All three books just mentioned are handsomely designed, graced with vital illustrations and thoroughly researched, wonderfully written and, for anyone wishing to know Byron in rich, deep detail I suggest they seek out these volumes. (Curious that all three of these books - including the one I am about to discuss - are written by women. Byron always attracted the ladies - in his own day down unto the present time, it seems.)

Anyway - along comes Edna O'Brien's take on the great man and poet. There are NO illustrations in this slim volume, despite Publisher's Weekly saying there were eight pages of illustrations in its review. The dustjacket - as designed by Evan Gaffney Design - is amongst the most lurid and cheesy book covers I have ever seen. The book itself: I wonder why it was actually written, in view of the mammoth biographies listed above (not to mention Leslie Marchand's epic three volume LIFE OF BYRON written in the late fifties.) I suppose if someone wants to know something of Lord Byron - but not too much - then this highly condensed and easy read is the book for them. It narrows in on Byron's love life (hence the blatant, trite title) so you will learn next to nothing of his poetry or what made his poetry great. The Diodati summer with the Shelley party is barely mentioned. (The book's jump from his failed marriage to his revels in Venice reminds me of the BBC Production BYRON done a few years ago; while a very good movie, it - like this book - is much too brief.) The authoress even wonders, in her introduction "Why another book on Byron?" - but her answer is quite lame and more non-answer anyway.

Despite great gaps in this telling of Byron's "short, daring life" (which despite only running 36 years comprised at the very least the lives of ten men) so much is quickly crammed in too few pages that, if you knew absolutely NOTHING about Byron, you'd probably end up more baffled than fully informed after reading this book. It would leave you...hungry. It is a TV dinner of a book. I understand Edna O'Brien is "universally recognized as one of our greatest novelists" - at least this is what the inside dustjacket flap informs me below a very posed and Byronesque/ Romantic photo of the writer. Well, if this is truly the case, perhaps it would have been wiser if Ms. O'Brien had written the Byron story as a novel. Now THAT would have been a relatively newer approach to his oft-told tale. Alas, she did not - and what we are left with just made me hunger to reread the three epic works listed at the beginning of this review.

26 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars She Allows the Reader to Reach His/Her Own Conclusions, June 16, 2009

By 

Stephanie DePue (Carolina Beach, NC USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life (Hardcover)

"Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life," gives us a short, daring treatment of the life of George Gordon, Lord Byron, noted romantic poet of the British Regency period. Byron, whom many consider to be the first modern celebrity, a rock star in his own time, composed the longer works "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," and "Don Juan," as well as the famed shorter works "She Walks in Beauty," "When We Two Parted," and "So, We'll Go No More A Roving." He lived most of his life (1788-1824) within what's considered the Regency period in Great Britain; (the time when George IV ascended the throne, although his father, George III was still alive, though mentally incapacitated; the situation required a regency.) This period is most strictly dated from 1811-1820; but is more generally considered to run from 1795-1837, between the English Georgian and Victorian ages. Jane Austen is generally considered the landmark British author of the age; but, despite Austen's pleasantly civilized domestic novels, it was a period of great licentious excess, particularly among the nobility, who were light years removed from, and astronomically richer than, their more ordinary compatriots. And Byron was the most licentious of them all: one of his many mistresses, the well-known Lady Caroline Lamb, notably characterized him as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." And, of course, as these things go, as the yin always calls forth the yang, this era was followed by the prudish and hypocritical Victorian period.

Edna O'Brien, noted Irish author (The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue), and most recently The Light of Evening), is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has earned great popularity for her work; also many awards, including the James Joyce Ulysses Medal, a Kingsley Amis Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (for Lantern Slides , 1990.) I cannot think of another author better suited, by coolness of wit and comprehension of unusual behavior, to bring back to life the poet's extraordinarily excessive existence. Byron was a nasty son, a never-satisfied lover of both sexes, a wounding husband and father, a wanton spendthrift, a loyal friend, and a reckless, generally foolish adventurer. However, if I may just interject here; this may be a somewhat novelistic treatment of the poet's life, but Byron, his family, friends and lovers were real people, of the upper castes, and portraits exist of most of them. I wish they'd been given to us here, so we could visualize these people.

Byron was an extraordinarily handsome and charismatic man, although he was born with a club foot and was lame all his life. He was the son of the heavy-set, frequently depressed Scottish noblewoman and heiress Catherine Gordon, second wife of Captain John "Mad Jack" Byron; and between the two of them, the pair spent every penny she had. The boy poet was sent to Harrow and Cambridge, two outstanding, prestigious, ancient schools, where the nobility were frequently sent. But Byron found flirtation more satisfying than study. At the age of ten, the poet-to-be inherited land and title from an uncle, becoming "Lord Byron." And it was off to the races with him. In 1812, he had a highly publicized affair with the married Lady Caroline Lamb, scandalizing the English public. He was to marry Lady Caroline's cousin, Anne Isabella (Annabella) Milbanke, also an heiress of the nobility, in 1815. Annabella had a miserable year with the man, as he much preferred his married half-sister Lady Augusta Leigh: both women delivered girls he presumably fathered at about the same time. Annabella soon legally separated from the poet, charging him with sodomy and incest; charges so serious English public opinion strongly turned against him, never to turn again to his favor during his life. So he went abroad. He became close friends with Percy Bysshe Shelley, another famed romantic poet in self-imposed exile, and Shelley's wife, Mary Godwin Shelley, who was to write the world-famous book Frankenstein . Byron fathered yet another daughter on Claire Clairmont, Mary's stepsister, and once again refused any support to mother or daughter. One of his last, best-known affairs was with the Italian Countess Teresa Guiccioli, who was to write a memoir about him. He died of a fever in Mesolonghi, Greece, at the age of 36, as he was trying to assist in that country's efforts to free itself from the Turkish Empire.

Frankly, I am no big fan of Byron, and never have been; nor am I a fan of Shelley. In fact, I have never been much of a fan of the romantic poets. I began my college career as an English major, signed up for the required course on the romantic poets, bought the required books, said to myself, what am I doing here? I don't like these guys, and became a history major. So I must say, O'Brien's book makes brilliantly clear and vivid the utter looniness of Byron's life; and, also, the seeming utter looniness of his friends, family: anybody who had anything to do with him. Her book, in fact, leaves me wondering if the entire continent was off its rocker at the time. But O'Brien remains remarkably non-judgmental throughout; she will allow the reader to reach his or her own conclusions.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Unclear What the Point Was?, September 1, 2009

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Todd and In Charge (Miami, FL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life (Kindle Edition)

Edna O'Brien is a gifted writer with a deft touch and a wonderful way of composing her sentences. And she has put together a breezy, light biography of Byron the man, mostly focusing on his loves and passions.

However, given the earlier comprehensive bios available, I was left at the end wondering what the point of this book exactly was? Is it for Byron fanatics, people with mild Byron interests -- who is the audience?

As much as I enjoyed reading it (and it's a quick read), I would pass unless you are a great fan of Ms. O'Brien.