Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life - Hardcover

O'Brien, Edna

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393070115 ISBN 13: 9780393070118

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009

Synopsis

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

About this title

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.

From The Washington Post:

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Justin Moyer "She walks in beauty, like the night/Of cloudless climes and starry skies;/And all that's best of dark and bright/ Meet in her aspect and her eyes": tender words for a libertine bard now remembered as the Jim Morrison of Romanticism. Irish novelist Edna O'Brien's "Byron in Love" follows the life of George Gordon Byron -- who reveled in his noblesse despite personal failings including, but not limited to, drunkenness, infidelity, bankruptcy, syphilis and incest -- through his love affairs with nobles and nobodies of both sexes. "I wanted to follow him in his Rake's Progress and his Poet's Progress," O'Brien says of her decision to write a breezy, character-driven biography of Lord Byron that forgoes lit-crit forensics to focus on the poet's dastardly deeds. O'Brien took a similar approach in her lively 1999 examination of her less-than-glamorous countryman James Joyce, but the technique garners mixed results here. Byron aficionados and fans of E! will relish sifting through the mountain of evidence that his lordship fathered a child with his half-sister, but those unfamiliar with early 19th-century Romanticism's dramatic break with Enlightenment rationalism risk losing the poetry amid the personality. Still, as Byron himself once wrote, "Folly loves the martyrdom of fame" -- and what fun's a literary life without a little folly?
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0393070115
• ISBN 13: 9780393070118
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240