Byron

January 15, 2023
The eventful, peripatetic life of a celebrated poet. Literary scholar Ellis, author of Byron in Geneva, draws on an abundant trove of sources--11 volumes of letters and journals, seven volumes of poetic works, and many biographies--to produce a succinct, authoritative life of George Gordon Byron (1788-1824). A member of the House of Lords, as a young man Byron harbored political ambitions, but he found his talents were best suited to literature. Although the poet was long considered one of the sublime Romantics, Ellis agrees with many recent critics who deem him a great comic writer with "a strong feeling for situations which have comic potential and an understanding of what makes for comedy in human character." The convolutions of his own life seem like a comedy of errors, as he juggled affairs, passionate infatuations, a short-lived marriage to the quickly disillusioned Annabella Milbanke, financial troubles, and literary aspirations. By the time he embarked on a grand world tour in 1809, he had fathered two children, at least one by a servant in his mother's home. During this period, "his style of living was unusually, not to say frantically, dissipated." Money spent on gambling, liquor, carriages, horses, servants, boxing and fencing lessons, and various other expenses left him continually in debt. Ellis offers perceptive readings of Byron's works, including Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, partly a "travel diary (in verse)," which catapulted the young poet to fame when it appeared in 1812; The Corsair, which was published two years later; and Don Juan. Byron is indelibly linked with the circle of friends who gathered in Geneva in 1816: Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin, and the persistent Claire Clairmont, who had set her sights on Byron after his break with Milbanke. In permanent exile from England, he died, probably from malaria, in Greece. A brisk, insightful literary biography.

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May 8, 2023
Reaktion continues its Critical Lives series with this spirited biography of English poet Lord Byron. University of Kent English professor Ellis (The Comic in Shakespeare), begins in 1788 with George Gordon Byron’s birth to a reckless father and quick-tempered mother who left him feeling “starved of affection.” According to Ellis, Byron was theatrical, snobbish, and daring from an early age, qualities that emboldened him to skewer the English literary establishment in his satirical book-length poem English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, published when he was 21. Several years later, the serialized release of Childe Harold, which offered a fictionalized account of the author’s travels through Europe, earned Byron literary fame and entrée to high society parties, where his good looks led to “tempestuous” affairs with men and women, as well as a disastrous marriage to Annabella Milbanke, “a much-cherished only child” who, Ellis suggests, was likely as egotistical as Byron. Accompanied by “a storm of criticism and abuse” over poems that some saw as slighting Milbanke, Byron left England in 1816 to roam around Greece, Switzerland, and Venice, Italy. Along the way, he completed the epic poems Manfred and Don Juan before succumbing to malaria in 1824. Ellis doesn’t skimp on the debauchery and captures the passion and turmoil that marked Byron’s art and life, though there isn’t much here that other Byron biographies haven’t said before. Still, this is a solid introduction to a captivating literary figure. Photos.