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Lord Byron in all his controversial splendor--the long-awaited, authoritative biography
With this brilliant book, Fiona MacCarthy has produced the most important work on Byron in nearly half a century. Granted unprecedented access to many documents and artifacts unexamined by previous scholars, the acclaimed biographer brings a fresh, engaging sensibility to a full appreciation of the poet's life and art.
Byron: Life and Legend explores heretofore unrevealed aspects of Byron's complex creative existence, reassessing his poetry, reinterpreting his incomparable letters, and reconsidering the voluminous record left by the poet's contemporaries: his friends and family, his critics and supporters.
MacCarthy's scope is comprehensive, giving due weight to each aspect of her subject's genius and covering the full range of his life, retracing his journeys through Italy, Turkey, and Greece and culminating in his heroic voyage to Missolonghi, where he died at the tragically early age of thirty-six. After his death, a pervasive Byronism swept Europe; presented here is the fascinating evolution of his posthumous reputation and its influence on literature, architecture, painting, music, manners, sex and psyche.
Full of energy and detail, subtlety and glamour, this vital new study reestablishes Byron as a charismatic figure in the forefront of European art.
- Sales Rank: #981363 in Books
- Published on: 2002-11-13
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.46" h x 2.16" w x 6.32" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 688 pages
From Publishers Weekly
While biographies of Byron have appeared with regularity since his death in 1824 at age 36, British author MacCarthy's (William Morris: A Life for Our Time) engrossing, coolly perceptive study of the Romantic poet is notable for its refusal to swoon over Byron's legend while still attuned to the evolution of his powerful personality and its impact on the world of art and literature. She notes how Byron went from being a mediocre student mocked by other boys to a charismatic leader of his peers and an extraordinarily well-read young man (though he read in secret, "to keep up his pose of anti-authoritarian idler"). She discusses how carefully he had to suppress his homosexual impulses in an increasingly conservative England, and how crucial his 1809-1810 travels in Greece and Turkey were to not only Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, but to his own life. The familiar arc of his fame covers an abortive career in English politics and a disastrous marriage (rent with rumors of incest with his half-sister), and the years of his exile in Switzerland, Italy and Greece, during which, MacCarthy argues, he introduced England to Europe and vice versa. She considers his poetry; his influence on English and European writers from Victor Hugo to Charlotte Bront‰; and the cult of Byron that developed after his death. If her dispassionate approach succeeds more in describing his fascinating, contradictory character than penetrating his psychology, she nonetheless gracefully shows how the "life" and "legend" of the subtitle fed off each other.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Beginning with his childhood and the sexual abuse that he likely suffered in the care of his nurse, MacCarthy (William Morris: A Life for Our Time) here offers an evenhanded portrait of the legendary Byron. She chronicles a life filled with tempestuous relationships (John Hobhouse, John Murray, and Percy Bysshe Shelley) and affairs (Lady Caroline Lamb, Claire Clairmont, and Countess Teresa Guiccioli) and documents how Byron's appreciation of the East during his early travels through Greece and Turkey influenced both his life and his writing. The dissolution of his abusive marriage amid rumors of sodomy and incest led to Byron's self-imposed exile in Switzerland, Italy, and, finally, Greece, where he died contributing to the fight for Greek independence. Throughout, MacCarthy maintains an objectivity that is remarkable given the powerful emotions her passionate, troubled subject tends to evoke. Following on the heels of David Crane's The Kindness of Sisters: Annabella Milbanke and the Destruction of the Byrons, this work is first-rate, offering a detailed account while refusing to judge its subject. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries.
William D. Walsh, Chester Coll. of New England, Manchester, NH
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"The most complete picture yet of the poet whom Oscar Wilde called ‘the great passionate human incomplete creature.’" -- Eric Porter, Harper's
"Thoroughly researched and well-written biography." -- Dinitia Smith, The New York Times
"Thoroughly researched, well written and beautifully produced . . . [MacCarthy] is a skilled biographer and a fluent writer." -- Adam Sisman, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"[An] important new life of Byron . . . Balanced, fair, throughly researched, and beautifully written, with . . . new material to offer." -- Anne Barton, The New York Review of Books
"[MacCarthy's] engrossing biography enlightens the sources that molded Lord Byron’s strange dual character and his driving ambition." -- Robert Taylor, Boston Sunday Globe
Most helpful customer reviews
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
First rate research against a dry story.
By T. Schmitt
Foremost, this is probably one of the most heavily researched books of Byron. Coming in at over 500 pages (and in small print!) this book exacting chronicles Byron's life. This tome certainly shows thousands of hours of research and work. Digging deep into the detail of Byron and the people in his life, this story reconciles different journalistic accounts of the same episodes, divines the truth when someone's memories are prone to hyperbole, and uncovers the mystery and motivation behind the stanzas in some of Byron's poems. For instance, the book even nabs Byron for fibbing at his cricket score! Undoubtedly, the research is first rate.
I take off one star for a couple of reasons. First, while the book is the complete life of Byron, the story itself feels academic and dry. It's the historic account of his life from one day to the next. So, in some places, the book becomes a run on of just one event to the next. There is no interpretation or anecdotes that bring Byron to life. It took some special effort to pay attention in some chapters.
Second, I wish the book would have developed the tangent of Bryon's dandyism and his dandy colleagues. Byron was familiar with two of histories greatest dandy's, Beau Brummell and Count d'Orsay. While Byron himself didn't label himself a dandy, he nonetheless had influence among this set and often hobnobbed with those who fashioned themselves as dandies. It would have been a rich vein if the book had told this tale a bit more.
Third, the mojo behind Byron's womanizing is left unexplained. While Byron was known as a great lady's man, the book never really uncovers his magic, his special charm that lead him to bed so many women. The tale is told, but not the special charm behind it. Oh, why didn't this book explain the mystery behind Byron's famous "Underlook!"
If you're looking for a lighter read of Byron, this isn't it. If you're looking for the complete life of Byron, then get this book.
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
THE Book on Byron...
By A Customer
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Don't see how anyone will outdo MacCarthy on Byron anytime soon: this is THE book on Byron--that is, on his biography: MacCarthy's nearly 700 page tome is all about the man, and very little about the literature. Which is curious, because usually we're accustomed to seeing "critical biographies"--meaning the story of the person's life dovetailed with a literary critical explication of the person's art. (By the way, although some have urged that Ellmann's tome on Joyce is the ne plus ultra of critical-bio [James Joyce (Oxford Lives)] I will yet insist that his exquisite work on Wilde is his truly greatest work [Oscar Wilde].)
In any case, while there's probably much critical literature on Byron's art, this is THE BOOK on his life.
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32 of 35 people found the following review helpful.
A Sophoclean hero
By Emile Lucien
Fiona MacCarthy's biography of Byron is a masterpiece of detail, insight and scholarship of a high order. It has already been acclaimed by the best critics as more than equal to her other fine biographies of Eric Gill and William Morris, and is a worthy successor to Lesley Marchand's definitive three-volume study, also published by John Murray. MacCarthy not only had the advantage of access to new material from the Murray archive, but her `re-assessment' of Byron's personal life benefited from being able to write without the severe restrictions and discretion placed upon earlier biographers, Marchand included. As a result, the inner conflicts and turmoil of Byron's life and loves emerge with a clarity and poignancy denied to earlier interpretations.
The life unfolds chronologically, the chapter headings specifying the countries and places representing the periods of Byron's life associated with them: Cambridge 1805-7, London and Brighton 1808-9, Greece and Constantinople 1809-10, and so on. The author's intellectual grasp and unstinting devotion to verifiable fact, all this no doubt enhanced by her five-year `pilgrimage' through the countries of Europe visited by Byron, lends authority and an authentic flavour to the style and language. The many references to correspondence, together with quotations from the poetry, are made with due regard to their relevance to particular places, people and events, the writer's occasional interpretative comment being well justified by her soundly-based acquaintance, and indeed intimacy, with the scope of her subject.
Such considered commentary, always unobtrusive, is necessary as much to the craftmanship and thematic working of the book as a whole, as it is to achieving a natural coherence and fluency in the language. For example, Byron tasted the `excitements' of gambling, encouraged by Scrope Davies, his Cambridge friend: "For Byron excitement was a state of bliss, in all respects preferable to inertia. Each turn of the card and each cast of the dice created life-enhancing tension. A gambler always lived in hope." Here there is a hint of symbolism, an insight into the risks and rewards of an adventurous life. Similarly, the description of a memorable episode involving the shooting dead of the Military Commander of Ravenna, Captain Luigi dal Pinto, in the street close to Byron's residence, later followed by an assassination attempt on Byron himself, concludes with the observation: "But what interested Byron most about the murder was not the local politics but the underlying strangeness, what it said about the human condition. What was the dividing line between a life and a death, he wondered as he sat beside the oddly tranquil body of the physically courageous but unpopular Dal Pinto....?" The comprehensive and meticulous `Sources and Reference Notes' provide the searching reader with page by page elucidation of the text, this further amplified by an excellent Index highlighting persons, locations, works and attributes.
This book will delight not only the literary scholar but also the critical general reader who is prepared to expend a certain mental effort in tackling what after all is a solid testament to a literary genius, a figure no less heroic than the Napoleon he emulated. The author eschews emotionalism and allows the drama of a life to speak from within itself: herein lies the writer's art. The characters themselves come to life in all their paradoxical humanity, whether it be - to name but a few - the absurdly capricious (and vindictive) Lady Caroline Lamb, fellow-poet and `brother outcast' Shelley, the loyal and protective Hobhouse, or Countess Teresa Guiccioli, Byron's most `enduring' mistress, with whom he conducted an affair `in an atmosphere of stealth and potential skulduggery'.
More controversial is MacCarthy's treatment of Byron's passionate friendships with adolescent boys, a subject either ignored, glossed over or minimised by previous biographers. Here, the interpretation - of ambiguous and sometimes sketchy evidence - is that these liaisons were central to the poet's emotional and sexual life, rather than the many, often flamboyant, affairs with women. Doris Langley (in her `Lord Byron: Accounts Rendered') argues the opposite: that women were his main emotional focus, while his boy-friendships are seen as mere diversions. MacCarthy's view is persuasive inasmuch as an `innate sexual orientation towards boys explains many of the lingering puzzles of his history.' The necessity of concealment thus lay behind `the dazzling obfuscations of his writing', as for example in the `Thyrza' poems addressed to the Cambridge chorister, John Edlestone.
What is irresistible is the idea of the nature of love as paradoxical, of passion and conflict as bedfellows, and the force with which the complex themes of raw emotional power and humanity resonate through the pages. `Byron Life and Legend' is beautifully produced and superbly illustrated. It is now an indispensable part of Byronic lore, and a `sine qua non' for literary collections and libraries.
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