BYRON

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.