Byron

by David Ellis

Overview

A fresh, concise account of the Romantic poet Lord Byron’s flamboyant life and work.
 
In this book, David Ellis traces Lord Byron’s life from rented lodgings in Aberdeen and the crumbling splendors of Newstead Abbey to his final grand tour of Asia. Describing his exile from England as well as his subsequent travels in Italy and Greece, Ellis shows just how completely Byron’s experiences colored both his serious and comic writings, such as Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and The Corsair. This is a fresh, concise, and clear-eyed account of the flamboyant poet’s life and work.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781789146820
Publisher:	Reaktion Books, Limited
Publication date:	03/28/2023
Series:	Critical Lives
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

David Ellis is emeritus professor of English literature at the University of Kent, and was awarded the Harry T. Moore prize for distinguished services to Lawrence studies. His books include Love and Sex in D. H. Lawrence.

Read an Excerpt

The events of Byron’s life were so out of the ordinary, and so intimately associated with what he wrote, that it would be cheating a reader not to give some account of them. They were no doubt one of the reasons why for a long period he was regarded as a great Romantic, one of those poets who, along with Keats and Shelley, pushed through the breach in the wall of eighteenth-century literary convention first made by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Byron himself would have challenged this characterization, and, more recently, a consensus has begun to form around the idea of him as not only one of Britain’s best comic writers, but the author, as Germaine Greer once put it, of ‘the greatest comic poem in English’.1 Supporting the first part of this claim are his letters, which are also a major source of information for his life. In the 1970s and ’80s, these were excellently edited in eleven volumes by L. A. Marchand, under the title Byron’s Letters and Journals. In order to keep my endnotes to a minimum, quotations from the letters in what follows are accompanied by an appropriate reference to Marchand’s edition, prefaced by blj. For the same reason, all quotations from Byron’s poems are followed in my text by references to either the seven volumes of Byron’s Complete Poetical Works (cpw), compiled and edited by Jerome J. McGann, or, where it is possible to cite an alternative - given the cost of those volumes - to McGann’s Lord Byron: The Major Works (lb), in the Oxford World’s Classics series (2008), where the same texts are used.

Editorial Reviews

"Intelligent and fair-minded."

Times Literary Supplement

David Ellis provides a concise and distinct review of Byron’s life and works . . . Detailing Byron’s complex life is certainly no straightforward task, yet Ellis approaches the subject with expertise, utilizing a variety of well-placed sources, understanding and good humor to create a vivid and unbiased portrayal of one of history’s most celebrated poets.

The Pilgrim

"Ellis has written a witty, lucid, and richly informative book that demonstrates what a great comic writer Lord Byron was; it’s brief, but every page punches above its weight."

John Worthen

"If any poet’s biography is worth knowing, it’s Byron’s, simply because the life was so full of incident. This does not mean that a biography could explain him, any more than reading his wonderful letters and journals can explain him, but they comprise a superior form of entertainment. David Ellis has now published a short biography, more a sketch of the life, in the Critical Lives series from Reaktion Books. It touches on the major influences and events."

Hudson Review

A lively and reliable picture of Byron’s life and works. Ellis delivers an evenhanded account of the poet’s adventures abroad and of the many dramas in his life—personal, financial, literary, and political.

Christopher W. Thompson

2022-12-23
The eventful, peripatetic life of a celebrated poet.

Literary scholar Ellis, author of Byron in Geneva, draws on an abundant trove of sources—11 volumes of letters and journals, seven volumes of poetic works, and many biographies—to produce a succinct, authoritative life of George Gordon Byron (1788-1824). A member of the House of Lords, as a young man Byron harbored political ambitions, but he found his talents were best suited to literature. Although the poet was long considered one of the sublime Romantics, Ellis agrees with many recent critics who deem him a great comic writer with “a strong feeling for situations which have comic potential and an understanding of what makes for comedy in human character.” The convolutions of his own life seem like a comedy of errors, as he juggled affairs, passionate infatuations, a short-lived marriage to the quickly disillusioned Annabella Milbanke, financial troubles, and literary aspirations. By the time he embarked on a grand world tour in 1809, he had fathered two children, at least one by a servant in his mother’s home. During this period, “his style of living was unusually, not to say frantically, dissipated.” Money spent on gambling, liquor, carriages, horses, servants, boxing and fencing lessons, and various other expenses left him continually in debt. Ellis offers perceptive readings of Byron’s works, including Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, partly a “travel diary (in verse),” which catapulted the young poet to fame when it appeared in 1812; The Corsair, which was published two years later; and Don Juan. Byron is indelibly linked with the circle of friends who gathered in Geneva in 1816: Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin, and the persistent Claire Clairmont, who had set her sights on Byron after his break with Milbanke. In permanent exile from England, he died, probably from malaria, in Greece.

A brisk, insightful literary biography.

Kirkus Reviews