The New Yorker
In the summer of 1938, a hundred and fourteen years after Lord Byron's nearly mythic death at Missolonghi, an intrepid vicar at the parish church of Hucknall Torkard and a small band of stalwarts decided to pay a visit to the poet of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" and "Don Juan" where he lay in the Byron family vault. The vicar and his crew were pleased to find, upon gingerly raising the coffin lid, that Byron had weathered the intervening years remarkably well. "The slightly protruding lip and curly hair were easily recognizable," reported an awestruck church caretaker. The incident -- perhaps the most literal in a long line of Byronic exhumations and reassessments -- turns up in Fiona MacCarthy's whopping
Byron: Life and Legend, an appropriately sprawling volume devoted to the "first European cultural celebrity of the modern age." Like his twentieth-century counterpart, Elvis Presley, Byron continues to exert a necrophilic hold on the imagination, with his colossal and contradictory public image. MacCarthy's account gives us Byron in all his twisted glory: keeping a pet bear while at Cambridge, crisscrossing Europe in a monumental carriage modelled after Napoleon's, drinking claret out of a human skull, swimming the Hellespont despite a lame foot, and constantly hounded by the open secret of his bisexuality.
As David Crane's The Kindness of Sisters makes clear, Byron was as maddening in love as he was in celebrity. Examining the understandably contentious relationship between Byron's wife, Annabella, and his half-sister (and lover), Augusta Leigh, Crane eloquently reminds us that there is "no English writer like him . . . no one who has so completely made his life the measure of his art."
(Mark Rozzo)
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. (Nov.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
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 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A densely detailed, lackluster life of the eminent poet, adventurer, and enfant terrible. Think of Jim Morrison, or maybe Kurt Cobain, and you’ll have an idea of how George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) was perceived by the young people of his time. He had all the rock star turns, after all: he thrived on shocking society, wrote ardent lyrics, wore such outré duds as "a frogged greatcoat and ‘a curious foreign cap,’ " figured prominently in gossip columns, traveled everywhere and in the worst of company, and died at the tender age of 35. Moreover, Byron wrestled with extraordinary demons: an absent father, an overweening and unhinged mother, a disfiguring handicap, an unreconciled and insatiable homosexuality, cycles of depression that sent him "veering between lassitude and hyperactivity, haunted by nightmare images and assailed by a sense of the uselessness of human endeavor." Throughout a life packed with action and sometimes misbegotten enterprise, Byron managed to write such resonant poems as Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan, to inspire Mary Shelley to pen Frankenstein (on something of a dare), to advance the cause of Greek independence against the Turks, and to set an example for bad-boy artists henceforth. Byron’s life, it seems, was without a single dull moment, but MacCarthy (William Morris, 1995, etc.) fails to convey any of the excitement or undeniable glamour of his days. Instead, she worries rather excessively over his handicap, the cause of his death, and the sexual torments that he managed to work his way through by sleeping with everyone in sight. Neither does she seem to have much of an appreciation for his writing—the source, after all, of his renown—or forhis achievements as a romantic revolutionary. Still, MacCarthy’s exhaustive catalogue of Byron’s every waking hour will be useful as source material for a future biographer seeking to craft a more interpretive—and shorter, and more interesting—study.
