Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life by Edna O’Brien
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Oh, Lord Byron. Sigh.
I was seriously obsessed with Byron, John Keats, Percy Shelley, and Mary Shelley when I was in high school. Why yes, I’ve seen Gothic about a million times. Also, on my first solo trip to Europe, I visited some of their haunts in Switzerland & Italy, saw Keats’ death mask, locks of their hair… I’m a nerd, I know.
There are a number of biographical tomes on Byron, and this is one of the most easily digestible ones. And that’s not just because it is normal-book-sized instead of phone-book-sized. As the title suggests, the book focuses on Byron’s love life – which was, uh, active to say the least. He was quite fickle with his affections, but though he bounced from one lover to the next (both men and women, though in his poems references to male lovers are concealed with female names), each love was passionate bordering on (and often crossing the border) insane.
Byron was a massively selfish, spoiled, and self-obsessed man. He was all kinds of abusive to the women who fell for him and got more deeply entangled with him than his usual 2 week to 2 month affairs (his wife; the mother of his daughter Allegra). I was reading this book as the Tucker Max movie was debuting and getting all kinds of well-deserved flak from feminists, and it made me look at Byron thru Tucker Max tinted lenses. Byron was an entitled dickhead, a destructive force in many ways, not unlike Tucker Max (um, except that Byron was a MUCH better writer).
That said, I can’t help but love and swoon over Byron. Maybe its a fucked up nostalgia for my teen years. Maybe it’s my romanticization of the Romantics and the nineteenth century in general. But even though he was a total dick, Byron – with his anorexia, his mental health problems, his club foot and chestnut hair, and his predilection for pets like bears and wolves – occupies this fantasy space for me that I won’t give up even though it’s irrational. Oh, Byron.
