Product Description

In this masterful portrait of the poet who dazzled an era and prefigured the modern age of celebrity, noted biographer Benita Eisler offers a fuller and more complex vision than we have yet been afforded of George Gordon, Lord Byron.

Eisler reexamines his poetic achievement in the context of his extraordinary life: the shameful and traumatic childhood; the swashbuckling adventures in the East; the instant stardom achieved with the publication ofChilde Harold's Pilgrimage; his passionate and destructive love affairs, including an incestuous liaison with his half-sister; and finally his tragic death in the cause of Greek independence. This magnificent record of a towering figure is sure to become the new standard biography of Byron.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #708018 in Books
• Published on: 2000-05-09
• Released on: 2000-05-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 880 pages

Amazon.com Review
"Obscured by the freedom fighter, fashion leader, fallen angel, and literary bad boy, Byron the great poet has tended to be forgotten," writes Benita Eisler in the closing chapter of her monumental biography, which goes a long way toward depicting George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) in a more balanced fashion. Even in his own era, when the first edition of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage sold out in three days, whispers of incest, homosexuality, and--far worse in Tory England--political radicalism grew so insistent that they drove Byron out of his homeland. Eisler's comprehensive narrative does ample justice to the impassioned love affairs that made him notorious, from his voluptuous half-sister, Augusta Leigh, to the erratic and vengeful Lady Caroline Lamb, who famously described him as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." Let's face it, those juicy stories are half the reason we want to read about Byron, but Eisler gives us the other half, too, reminding her readers with lengthy quotes and intelligent exegesis that Don Juan is one of the greatest poems in English, and Byron one of the most influential and important poets. Her impeccably researched text is lucid about Byron's beliefs, candid about his faults, and persuasively ardent about his genius. --Wendy Smith

From Publishers Weekly
On May 17, 1824, one month after George Gordon Lord Byron (b. 1788) caught fever in a Missolonghi rainstorm while fighting for the liberation of Greece, the cautious publisher John Murray, with the blessing of Byron's ex-wife, Annabella, and his beloved half-sister, Augusta, took a match to an unpublished work by the famous poetAthe two-volume manuscript that was his memoirs. Perhaps it was this act that opened the flue for Byron biography, for as more and more of the seamy details of the poet's highly dissolute life come to light, the abiding hope remains that the destroyed work contained still more. Eisler's (O'Keeffe and Stieglitz: An American Romance) exhaustive biography portrays Byron as a restless, brilliant man in thrall: he is, in her view, the puppet of his own extravagant passions and even in his lifetime was so fictionalized and mythologized by others that he found it hard to maintain his own sense of self. Whereas Phyllis Grosskurth's study of two years ago, Byron: The Flawed Angel, used psychoanalytic arguments to show the poet's state of mind and possible manic depression, Eisler is more interested in the interaction between his amorous attachments and his poems. She quotes from his oeuvre liberally and with the good timing of an able literary critic, as she details the romances of the great Romantic, from his childhood crushes, through secret schoolboy encounters, affairs with other men and with the society belles and salonistes like the Ladies Oxford and Lamb, his marriage to Annabella, his incest with Augusta, dalliances with countless other women he would ultimately spurn, and his final, protracted involvement with Teresa Guiccioli. There are moments when Eisler's tight rein on her prose slackens to clich?, as when, having described so many of the beauties Byron bedded, Teresa is given the proverbial "little white teeth like perfectly matched pearls." But in the main, Eisler's lusty enjoyment of her subject's many escapades animates the story she tells in words both elegant and provocative. The mind-boggling array of quotations, excerpts, and eyewitness and historical accounts she has amassed give face and flesh not only to the poet born under a bad, bright star, but to those whose lives he illuminated briefly.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
If Byron learned poetry from Pope and the classical poets, he learned wickedness from his father, the drunken, incestuous Mad Jack Byron, who died penniless at 36. And although there is no doubt that the poet himself sought "moral suicide," it is also true that his energies were ethereal as well as diabolicAif he was adept at ruining the happiness of others, he was also capable of writing some of the most sublime poetry of his time and ours. With a life like his, the biographer need only stand aside, which Eisler does, for the most part; she psychologizes occasionally but unnecessarily, since Byron hid nothing in his quest to become the hero of his own life. Ultimately, that life upstaged the poetry, as Eisler (author of O'Keeffe and Stieglitz: An American Romance, LJ 4/15/91) notes toward the end of this thoroughly engaging study. Byron too died when he was only 36, and his autopsy report noted many signs of disease, including the fact that, "strangest of all, the sutures of the skull had fused together, a sign of immense age." Eisler pays ample attention to Byron's work, making this an excellent complement to Grosskurth's purely biographical Byron (LJ 4/15/97). Highly recommended.ADavid Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Preciously Byronic
To begin with, the more exacting reviewers are correct in their assertions that there is nothing new here, aside from Eisler's "spin" on previously well-known facts about the infamous and lionized Poet and Lord. This book is definitely NOT for those interested in a thorough, searching delve into Byron and his poetry. But, moreover, it is not even the "page-turner" which other reviewers make it out to be.

The book is written in this precious, cozy, semi-academese which drains the blood from the writing. There is no evaluation of the poet in the context in the particular developmental stage of English poetry at the time. And Shelley, in particular, gets a particularly curt dismissal.---But the real problem with this biography is not that Eisler is dismissive of other (in Shelley's case, better) poets or that her book is simply a rehashing of previously known circumstances. The problem is her plodding, lifeless, cutesy writing style. By the end of the book, one feels that Ms. Eisler has appropriated Byron into her cozy world of popularized, made-for-giant-publishing-houses beach-read bios. Has anyone else noticed that all the chapters are almost the exact number of pages in length? Such precise compartmentalization does not for the reflection of a life make, in particular Byron's!

The one merit this book indisbutably does have is to make you want to read or reread Byron's poetry. Eisler's citations of neatly culled snippets are the only lively thing in the book! So, after you've read all about the minutiae of the poet's life and feel drained and off-put at the end:

Close thy Eisler! Open thy Byron!

Less Than One Star, But I Can't Put That, Apparently
Please do not buy this book. As an academic whose specialty area is Lord Byron, I urge you to avoid this sensationalist and poorly written work at all costs. It is, aside from anything else, full of small mistakes regarding dates, etc. If you are looking for a reliable recent biography of Byron, buy the Fiona Macarthy book before you buy this one. If you are willing to spend more and hunt more, and don't mind a book that, because of the time when it was written, scants the issue of Byron's complex sexual tastes, the undoubted go-to bio is Leslie Marchand's three volume work from 1957. Old, but still the best.

Generally good; a fun summer read.
I became interested in Byron after reading a brief biography of the poet in a women's magazine which mentioned, among other things, the shocking fact that Byron had indulged in incest with his half-sister and fathered a child by her. Could this, I wondered, be true? And if so, why had none of my English teachers bothered to mention this titillating detail (there being no better way to motivate kids to read than by sharing prurient, violent, or otherwise scandalous of disgusting tidbits with them)?

Fortunately for me, my step-mother is a scholar of Byron, and, on hearing of my interest, she promptly sent me Eisler's biography of Byron, which, weighing in at over 800 pages, promised to satisfy my need for prurience in spades.

As it turns out, I did enjoy Eisler's biography and the portrait that she paints of the poet, his contemporaries, and his travels. Byron's reputation as a literary bad-boy seems to have been richly deserved. Eisler chronicles his early homosexual interests, his penchant for getting low-class servants and prostitutes pregnant, his cynical association with a society maven a la Les Liasons Dangereuses which resulted in his catastrophic marriage to an innocent, upright, and deeply religious young woman, his affair with his sister, and (when social outrage threatened to make things uncomfortable for him) his eventual flight from England, leaving his sister and their infant daughter to bear the stigma and to withstand the scorn of society alone.

Eisler mixes this tale of profligate erotic dalliance with serious consideration of the literary development of the poet, from his first forays into verse as a boy to his final production of masterpieces such as Don Juan. She also weaves into her story details of the pressing financial problems which faced the impoverished (and irresponsible) young peer and analysis of the effect of Byron's physical problems (a club foot and a life-long tendency to being overweight) on his growth as a man and an artist.

Yet there are also weaknesses in Eisler's work, some of which may merely be the inevitable errors which creep into any lengthy work, but which nevertheless cause the reader some concern as to Eisler's judgement. Let me offer an example which requires a bit of background information: a) when writing letters it was common, in the early 19th century, to abbreviated words; b) Byron's ancestral home was Newstead Abbey; c) Byron liked, for reasons unclear, to call his girlfriends 'Antelope.' What should we then understand when Lady Caroline Lamb, one of Byron's lovers, writes: "you give us both up no ties can bind but Newstead A bears your unkindness in sullen silence"? While you, dear reader, might assume the word starting with A that Caroline abbreviated was "Abbey," Eisler thinks otherwise, filling in "Antelope" (albeit with a question mark indicating uncertainty). Try reading the sentence again and see which interpretation makes more sense.

There are other similar little slips scattered throughout the volume--not so many as to seriously damage the work, but enough to make the reader wonder about the care with which the manuscript was prepared. Other aspects of the book, too, leave room for improvement. Why, for instance, is a holograph letter reproduced at the end of the book but never (as far as I can tell) referred to in the text? Why is there no map to assist the reader in following Byron on his complicated travels throughout Europe and the East? Why do we learn so little about the Gothic movement by which Byron, evidently, was influenced? And could we not hear more of the reception of Byron's poems by his contemporaries?

These problems, however, are small in the grand scheme of things. Overall, through Eisler's work we can appreciate many different sides of Byron and of the fascination that he exercised on so many of those who met him. Perhaps the most flattering thing I can say about Eisler's work is that I found it compelling right to the end, and it has certainly inspired me to read more of Byron's verse.