What’s Still Controversial About Byron?
What’s Still Controversial About Byron?
Two centuries after the poet’s death, here’s why his work and life remain enigmatic and riveting.
TWO HUNDRED YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH on April 19, 1824 at the age of 36, Lord Byron remains, a riveting figure—and a maddeningly elusive creature of paradox. He is the ultimate Romantic poet; yet he often deplored Romanticism as a pernicious literary trend, and sometimes expressed doubt that poetry was a worthy career. He is literature’s most illustrious sex symbol, a libertine who claimed what we would now call a “body count” of well over two hundred women; also, to some, England’s great gay poet before Oscar Wilde, or maybe the great “queer” figure of ambiguous and fluid sexuality. He’s been described as an abusive misogynist and a proto-feminist. He’s a privileged man whose eloquent advocacy for the oppressed coexists with snobbery and narcissistic self-indulgence—until he sacrifices everything, including his life, in the revolutionary cause of Greece’s liberation from Turkish rule. He is a figure deeply embedded in the culture and politics of his time, but also startlingly modern in countless ways, from the unconventional rhymes and runover lines of his later poetry to the chatty irony of his narrative voice to his real-life persona. His tumultuous life was itself a work of self-mythologizing art; yet his magnum opus, the unfinished epic poem Don Juan, is a masterpiece of comic genius rich in ironic distance and self-deprecation.
The sheer scope of Byron’s cultural impact is almost impossible to grasp. He profoundly influenced European Romanticism—in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and perhaps nowhere more than Russia. (Pushkin, a decade Byron’s junior, followed him in the shift from lyrical angst and passionate turmoil to irreverent humor and mordant satire; uncannily, his career ended in early death at almost the same age, 37 to Byron’s 36.) In the United States, where nearly a hundred editions of Byron’s work were published just in his lifetime and his verse dramas and adaptations of his tales appeared frequently on the stage in the nineteenth century, his literary heirs notably included Edgar Allan Poe. He was an icon in Latin America, and was among the first Western authors translated in China.
Byron is one of a handful of writers to have lent their names to an adjective, Byronic, and also to an archetype: the Byronic hero, dangerous, brooding, sensual, rebellious, fiercely individualistic, usually a bearer of dark secrets and abiding passion for one woman. This type harks back to Byron’s own public persona as much as to his literary creations: One of his more notorious lovers, Lady Caroline Lamb, famously described him as, “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” a phrase that launched a thousand literary bad boys. He is also, for better or worse, the co-progenitor of the romantic literary vampire: a fragment Byron wrote inspired his physician and friend John Polidori to write a vampire tale that was initially attributed to Byron himself, and whose brooding aristocratic protagonist was a bit of a Byron alter ego. If you loathe Twilight, you know whom to blame.1
As the many tributes on the bicentennial of Byron’s death attest, his grip on the literary imagination remains strong. Not surprisingly, Byron—and Byron-adjacent—books keep coming out, biographies and collections and critical studies, from both trade and academic presses. Among the many recent titles, the most notable are the riveting Byron: A Life in Ten Letters by University of Virginia professor Andrew Stauffer—cleverly organized around ten letters from the poet spanning a period from his college youth to the final weeks of his life—and Byron’s Travels, a 665-page selection of his poems, letters, and journals from Knopf’s Everyman’s Library, arranged to reflect his wanderings, first as an adventurous young man and then as a famous exile.
GEORGE GORDON BYRON WAS BORN on January 22, 1788, the son of army officer John “Jack” Byron and wealthy heiress Catherine Gordon. Jack Byron had his own notorious history (his first marriage was the fruit of a scandalous affair with a married noblewoman, and of her subsequent divorce); he was also an incorrigible profligate whose wife had to scramble to find ways, under the patriarchal laws of the time, to keep him from squandering her fortune. Jack lived only briefly with his wife and son and died in France when the boy was 3. George was 10 when he inherited his title, the 6th Baron Byron, from a great-uncle who was reportedly known as “the wicked lord” and “the devil Byron,” particularly after he ran a neighbor through in an impromptu duel in a pub. (A descendant of that neighbor’s, Mary Chaworth, was Byron’s first great passion when he was 15.) In a novel, these would be omens of a turbulent life; so, in this case, in reality.
Besides desertion by his father, Byron’s childhood was marked by other traumatic events that shaped his adult personality. His mother, intensely devoted to her son in her own way, careened between showering the boy with affection and lashing out in fits of rage, not physically violent but verbally abusive. On at least one occasion, she called him a “lame brat,” a reference to his congenitally deformed right foot. She also insisted on painful treatments in a futile attempt to correct the defect. (In an unfinished drama, The Deformed Transformed, written in 1822 and published posthumously, Byron has a hunchbacked hero, Arnold, who makes a pact with the devil to be rid of his deformity; it opens with a scene in which Arnold’s mother berates him as a “monstrous sport of Nature.” The autobiographical subtext is indisputable.)
To this, add physical and very likely sexual abuse by an alcoholic nursemaid when Byron was between the ages of 9 and 11. Family solicitor John Hanson asked Mrs. Byron to dismiss the nursemaid because of her disreputable behavior and the vicious beatings of young George; some twenty-five years later, after Byron’s death, Hanson told a close friend of Byron’s that the maid “used to come to bed to [Byron] and play tricks with his person.” Byron himself wrote in a journal that his “passions were developed very early,” so early “that few would believe me—if I were to state the period.” On the other hand, one skeptical scholar points to a journal entry in which, describing a crush on a girl at the age of 8, Byron wrote that he “had no sexual ideas for years afterward.”
Byron’s early schooling was uneven; after several years at the prestigious Harrow School, he enrolled at Trinity College in Cambridge in 1805. At 17 he was already showing the flamboyant and mischievous defiance that later came to be associated with his name: When informed that college rules prohibited keeping dogs in the rooms, he got a pet bear instead. Two years later, he published his first collection of poetry, Hours of Idleness; when it was savaged by anonymous critics, he savaged them back in his first satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. In 1809, he embarked on a two-year trip to the Mediterranean, a replacement for the European “Grand Tour” that had been customary for young noblemen since the late eighteenth century but was now out of reach due to the Napoleonic wars.
Then, in March 1812, the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage made Byron an instant celebrity; as he famously said, “I awoke one morning to find myself famous.” Ironically, Childe Harold is, among his better-known works, the one that has fared the least well under the test of time. Later critics have tended to regard the poem and its ennui-stricken, disillusioned, pleasure-jaded hero as exemplifying Romanticism’s worst penchants toward self-indulgent, self-dramatizing, and ultimately trivial angst (tendencies for which Byron himself often expressed sarcastic contempt). A sample stanza from near the beginning:
Yet oft-times in his maddest mirthful mood Strange pangs would flash along Childe Harold’s brow, As if the memory of some deadly feud Or disappointed passion lurk’d below: But this none knew, nor haply cared to know; For his was not that open, artless soul That feels relief by bidding sorrow flow, Nor sought he friend to counsel or condole, Whate’er this grief mote be, which he could not control.
On and on it goes in that mopey vein. Explaining a craze that has lost its luster can be difficult ten years later, let alone two centuries later, but University of Cambridge literary scholar Corin Throsby argues, intriguingly, that one reason the poem was a hit was the “pilgrimage” part: It was a detailed travelogue of “landscapes and people that, in 1812, the majority of British readers never had a hope of seeing for themselves.” Whatever the reason, a hit it was. Byron’s four “Oriental Tales,” which followed in 1813–14—The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, and Lara—further captured public imagination with their passion, mystery, and exotic settings, and with Byronic heroes more dramatic than the morose Childe Harold, such as The Corsair’s fierce-but-honorable pirate Conrad.
“Byromania” (a term coined, apparently, by Byron’s future wife Anne Isabella “Annabella” Milbanke) brought with it hordes of female fans—what we would nowadays call groupies. The scandalous affair with the volcanic Lady Caroline Lamb was one of the consequences. Byron’s efforts to extricate himself from this fiasco led to his courtship of Caroline’s cousin Annabella, whose intelligence captivated him and whose somewhat prim virtue apparently both attracted him and put him off. Also on the plus side of the ledger was Annabella’s large fortune: After his mother’s death in 1811, Byron was beset by financial problems. (At that point, he still refused royalties for his work, holding on to aristocratic prejudice against such earnings.) Annabella initially rejected his marriage proposal, partly on the grounds of “the Irreligious nature of his principles,” but then gave him encouragement to renew his suit. At the same time, by overwhelming consensus among Byron scholars, Byron was also having a passionate affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh (née Byron, the only surviving child from Jack Byron’s first marriage), with whom he had had little contact until 1813.
Byron and Annabella Milbanke were married on January 2, 1815. On January 16, 1816, Lady Byron went to her parents’ home with the couple’s five-week-old daughter, Ada, for what was supposed to be a temporary stay in the country and became a permanent parting. What happened in between has been the subject of two hundred years of intense speculation; the wars between Team Lord Byron and Team Lady Byron, with each side weaponizing carefully selected papers from family archives, continued well into the twentieth century and echo to this day. It seems incontrovertible, however, that Byron sometimes subjected his wife to shocking psychological abuse: frightening rages, cold and cruel insults, drunken ravings, flaunted infidelity. (Some other grisly allegations—for instance, that he repeatedly tried to coerce Annabella into sex while she was recovering from childbirth, culminating in actual attempted rape—remain unresolved.) By the time Ada was born, Annabella, Augusta, and some friends were questioning Byron’s sanity; while a physician eventually declared that he was not insane (prompting Annabella to take a more judgmental stance toward his awful behavior), there is little doubt that his mental state, exacerbated by heavy drinking, was extremely precarious.
The Byrons’ separation was finalized by a formal deed on April 21 after acrimonious negotiations. Public interest in the celebrity poet’s marital woes was feverish, and damning rumors of abuse, adultery, incest, and sodomy were swirling about. When Byron tried to defend himself with a small private printing of two poems—“Fare Thee Well,” a missive to Annabella that oscillated between tenderness, accusation, and self-pity, and “A Sketch from Private Life,” a vicious broadside against Annabella’s maid and former governess, whom he saw as poisoning her against him—they made their way into several newspapers and added fuel to the anti-Byron backlash. A satirical print by the eminent cartoonist Isaac Cruikshank which showed Byron waving goodbye to his wife and infant daughter with his arm draped around a scantily clad actress sums up the general tenor of public opinion:
On April 25, 1816, Byron left England for the last time, his fortune and his reputation in a shambles. But the remaining eight years turned out to be the most productive, and at least sometimes the happiest, of his life.
BYRON’S WANDERINGS TOOK HIM to Switzerland; there was the legendary summer of 1816 at Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva in the company of the physician Polidori, with Percy Bysshe Shelley and the future Mary Shelley (then Godwin) as neighbors, along with Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, who had earlier openly pursued an ill-fated sexual relationship with Byron. It was at this villa that a storytelling session in rainy weather and a subsequent story-writing contest birthed both Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Polidori’s Byron-inspired The Vampyre, a precursor of Bram Stoker’s Dracula—shaping a large chunk of the film industry a century later.2
There was, after that, a three-year sojourn in Venice, where Byron boasted to a friend that he had “run the Gauntlet” of over two hundred women; he also found time and energy to write, penning not only the last canto of Childe Harold but two of his finest, and extremely different, works. The Faustian “dramatic poem” Manfred, which inspired musical pieces by Schumann and Tchaikovsky, offered a dark Byronic hero with less melodrama and more depth: a secretive nobleman with mastery of the magical arts and with a tragic, guilty love in his past, who finally defies both demons from hell and the comfort of religion as he faces his demise, declaring, “I’ll die as I have lived—alone.” The sparklingly humorous verse novella Beppo was a tonal shift, presaging Don Juan in both form and informal flippancy. The story celebrates Italy, Venice, and the Venetians’ laid-back attitudes toward sex and love (the unflappable heroine takes a lover after her merchant husband is lost at sea, until he suddenly resurfaces and they settle into a cheerful ménage à trois). Along the way, there are tongue-in-cheek musings on various things including society life, literary poseurs, intellectual women, the author’s own persona (“A broken dandy lately on my travels”), and the merits of England:
I like the taxes, when they’re not too many; I like a seacoal fire, when not too dear; I like a beef-steak, too, as well as any; Have no objection to a pot of beer; I like the weather, when it is not rainy, That is, I like two months of every year, And so God save the Regent, Church, and King! Which means that I like all and everything.
A shift in Byron’s life was coming as well. In 1819, his exhausting sexual marathon came to an end when, at 31, he fell in love with 19-year-old Countess Teresa Guiccioli—beautiful, smart, and unhappily married to a much older, mercurial, and abusive man. She became, Stauffer writes, “the love of his life” and almost certainly his last lover, a woman with whom, as his letters both to Teresa and to his friends reveal, he discovered “new structures of feeling . . . pushing past irony and self-protective coldness, past the calculated chaos of promiscuous sex toward something he had never really tried before: monogamous commitment.” After some early turmoil the two settled into a remarkably harmonious relationship, aided by a separation which Guiccioli was granted by the Pope.
MEANWHILE, BYRON WAS WRITING his masterwork, Don Juan. The first two cantos were published in 1819; the last two (XV and XVI) came out in 1824, just weeks before his death. The poem was instantly controversial, and not just because of the sexual content. The sarcastic dedication to conservative poet Robert Southey flaunted the author’s radical politics; the first canto chronicled the troubled marriage of the hero’s parents in a way that rather transparently depicted Byron’s own marital breakup, with Annabella caricatured as the coldly self-righteous Donna Inez; the second canto turned cannibalism among starving survivors of a shipwreck into a subject for very dark—and irresistible—humor. (Byron told his publisher John Murray that his sole purpose in writing “Donny Johnny” was to “giggle and make giggle,” but when you’re making people giggle at a line like, “The sailors ate the rest of poor Pedrillo,” you’re bound to upset some of them.) In a later canto, Byron defended himself against the charge of being too cynical, comparing his epic to the northern lights:
And such as they are, such my present tale is, A non-descript and ever-varying rhyme, A versified Aurora Borealis, Which flashes o’er a waste and icy clime. When we know what all are, we must bewail us, But ne’ertheless I hope it is no crime To laugh at all things—for I wish to know What, after all, are all things—but a show?
Despite the criticism, Don Juan also won instant acclaim (early fans included Goethe). And yet in the 1820s, Byron grew restless anew. Some biographers suggest that he was chafing at his domestication in the relationship with Teresa, despite his continuing love for her. But he also wanted something more out of life than love and literature. He craved action—in particular, of a liberatory political kind. For a while he was involved, with Teresa’s brother and father, in the radical Italian underground that aspired toward the unification of Italy under a constitutional republic. Then, convinced that the movement was too weak and disorganized to succeed, he became passionately involved with a new cause: Greece’s war of liberation against the Ottoman Empire, from which it had declared independence in January 1822.
On July 16, 1823, Byron sailed to Cephalonia; he also sold his English estate to finance the Greek cause. The factional infighting among Greek patriots, which sometimes included actual military clashes, left him bitterly frustrated; nevertheless, he managed to fund, and help organize, a battalion of two hundred men and thirty officers (mostly philhellene foreigners like himself). He also apparently fell madly in love with a handsome 15-year-old Greek boy, Loukas Chalandritsanos, whom Byron took on as a page and lavished with gifts and money; Loukas took the gifts but emphatically did not return the feelings.
In one of his last poems, dated to his thirty-sixth birthday—January 22, 1824—Byron seemed to anticipate approaching death. After lamenting the loss of his youth and of the ability to have his passion requited, he castigates himself for thinking of such unmanly things amid the revival of Greece’s glory, and finally concludes with what sounds like his own epitaph:
If thou regret’st thy Youth, why live? The land of honourable Death Is here:—up to the Field, and give Away thy breath! Seek out—less often sought than found— A Soldier’s Grave, for thee the best; Then look around, and choose thy Ground, And take thy rest.
Of course, that wasn’t the death Byron found. His health was failing; an illness in February prevented him from joining what would have been his first military expedition, and recovery was followed by a severe cold (and possibly a malarial infection) in April. Whether it was the illness that killed him or the doctors who insisted on bleeding him, as was then still the practice, is hard to say; but on April 19, the poet and would-be warrior was dead. In Greece, the news caused such an outpouring of grief that the provisional government suspended the Easter festival, ordered all shops to close for three days, and announced twenty days of mourning. In England, “Byromania” returned, with mourners from all walks of life mobbing the funeral procession in London and flocking to see the body at a mansion rented for the purpose; while Byron’s scandalous past still denied him a place in the Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey, the newspapers declared that his death should shift the focus from his flaws to “his brilliant talents” and “his aspirations for the happiness and liberty of mankind.” In France, Victor Hugo wrote, “When the death of this poet was announced, it seemed to us that we were robbed of a part of our future.”
AS BEFITS THE MAN WHO CREATED mysterious heroes, Byron left quite a few mysteries behind—compounded by the fact that shortly after his death, his friends and family burned the only extant copy of the memoirs he had written for posthumous publication. Did it contain shocking secrets perhaps still unknown? Byron biographer Doris Langley Moore rather convincingly shot down this notion sixty years ago, pointing out that Byron authorized his publisher, Murray, to show the manuscript to anyone who wanted to read it, and numerous people did read it—including the still-vengeful Caroline Lamb. Byron offered a preview to Lady Byron, who declined. (He also wrote to her that he had “omitted the most important and decisive events and passions of [his] existence not to compromise others.”)3
The ultimate shocking secret, of course, is Byron’s sexual relationship with Augusta. Long rumored, it was still a bombshell when in 1869, forty-five years after Byron’s death, Harriet Beecher Stowe aired the charge in a long article in the Atlantic, “The True Story of Lady Byron’s Life” (in response to the publication of Teresa Guiccioli’s memoirs about Byron, which portrayed Lady Byron as a cold-hearted, unforgiving pillar of virtue). “From the height at which he might have been happy as the husband of a noble woman,” Stowe wrote,
he fell into the depths of a secret adulterous intrigue with a blood relation, so near in consanguinity that discovery must have been utter ruin and expulsion from civilized society. From henceforth, this damning guilty secret became the ruling force in his life, holding him with a morbid fascination, yet filling him with remorse and anguish and insane dread of detection.
Today, even Byron-friendly biographers such as Stauffer take it as a given that Byron’s relationship with his half-sister was sexual, partly on the strength of comments in his letters to an older female friend. In particular, Byron seemed to admit, or least transparently hint at, his possible parentage of Augusta’s daughter Elizabeth Medora Leigh, born in 1814. Yet in an interesting essay in the 2003 collection Romantic Biography, University of Manchester scholar Alan Rawes argues that the certainty is misplaced and that the incriminating innuendo may have been intended to tease his hard-to-scandalize confidante.
Altogether, though, the weight of the evidence favors a sexual relationship, including the pair’s expressions of mutual devotion. In 1813, Augusta sent Byron a lock of her hair with a French-language note that pledged “to share all your feelings, to see only through your eyes … to live only for you” as “the only destiny that can make me happy”; Byron preserved the lock and the note in a paper inscribed, “La Chevelure of the one whom I most loved.” The sentiments certainly seem romantic more than familial, and there are too many hints that these sentiments did not remain platonic. But there is also plenty of speculation and conjecture, often based solely on Annabella’s hardly disinterested testimony.
The Byrons’ marriage from hell, too, has its mysteries: there is convincing evidence that at least at first, the two shared genuine tenderness and intimacy as well as abundant and satisfying sex. What made Byron turn so viciously on Annabella, for whom he had professed both esteem and affection? Was it that they were disastrously unsuited temperamentally? (Augusta advised Annabella to handle Byron’s, well, Byronic posturing—declarations that it was too late for her to save him and now they were both damned, or hints at monstrous secrets in his past—by laughing it off or scolding him for his juvenile antics, but that was one thing the earnest Lady Byron couldn’t do.) Was it that, as British scholar Antony Peattie suggests in The Private Life of Lord Byron, marriage triggered his fears of female dominance and rekindled the childhood trauma of emotional abuse? Was it Augusta? Or, as Fiona MacCarthy argues in Byron: Life and Legend, does the real answer lie in Byron’s primary attraction to young men, for which his heterosexual relationships, including the Annabella/Augusta triangle, were merely a diversion or compensation? (If so, University of Kent emeritus professor David Ellis remarks dryly in a slim new biography, “all one can say is that Byron did a remarkable amount of compensating.”)
The extent of Byron’s same-sex relationships or encounters is another subject on which the truth remains elusive—a subject that was shrouded in shameful secrecy until some cautious mentions in the mid-1950s but has attracted considerable attention in recent decades. The known fact is that Byron had sex with adolescent males on his trip to Greece and Turkey (he was startlingly candid in admitting it to lifelong close friend John Hobhouse, using a Latin code based on Petronius’s Satyricon). His relationship during that time with Italian traveling companion and servant Nicolo Giraud, 15 or 16 years old, may have been sexual, as well; and the twilight infatuation with Loukas was clearly chaste only because it was unrequited. One can certainly see a significance in the fact that Byron’s last poems—including “Love and Death,” which is thought to be his final work and ends with the exquisite line, “To strongly, wrongly, vainly love thee still”—were expressions of same-sex love. On the other hand, Byron’s intense attachments to younger male friends in college are regarded by Ellis and many other scholars as passionate but platonic friendships, perhaps with a romantic undercurrent but almost certainly with no sexual activity. Either way, Byron’s bisexuality is well-established; but MacCarthy’s “gay Byron” thesis requires her to explain away far too many inconvenient facts until she finally gives up when confronted with Byron’s passionate love for Guiccioli.4
THE MORE SALIENT FACT, PERHAPS, is that Byron’s love life and sex life has tended to command an inordinate amount of biographical attention. And there is plenty more to Byron than sex. There are his forays into politics in England as a member of the House of Lords, where he championed the emancipation of Catholics and spoke against draconian penalties for “Luddite” workers. There is his lifelong interest in the French Revolution, to whose heroes there is a tribute at the start of Don Juan, and in Napoleon, whom he saw as both the champion and the betrayer of revolutionary ideals. Though an admirer of the American experiment, Byron was deeply ambivalent about democracy, which he saw as rife with potential for mob rule—“an aristocracy of blackguards,” he once wrote—but always passionately devoted to freedom, personal as well as political; DePaul University scholar Jonathan David Gross shows that Byron was one of the earliest adopters of the term “liberal” in the political sense of “pro-liberty.”
Byron’s liberal politics also manifested themselves in his passion for national liberation movements—in South America, for example—even before the fateful trip to Greece. That trip, historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook suggest in a new podcast marking the Byron bicentennial, arguably pioneered the phenomenon of Western elite support for the cause of freedom in a foreign nation: A time-traveling Byron today would probably be championing Ukraine, whose eighteenth-century national hero Ivan Mazepa was the subject of his influential 1819 poetic tale Mazeppa. Byron’s sympathy for small nations oppressed by empires probably also accounts for his little-known interest in Armenian language and culture (he helped publish the first Armenian-English dictionary).
Still, in the end, it’s the poetry that matters. Childe Harold and Byron’s 1813–14 verse tales have their own defenders: In the London Review of Books, Oxford scholar Clare Bucknell argues that they have been somewhat unfairly overshadowed by the sheer brilliance of the later work and points out their fascinating ambiguities, textual shifts, and “interruptions”—even while allowing that these poems have some “uniquely ill-judged” elements of melodrama that the later ones avoid.
But Don Juan is the towering pinnacle—“by far the greatest comic poem in English,” according to Germaine Greer. It is, for one thing, a wonderful epic story that gives its hero, the unregenerate libertine of legend, an entirely fresh incarnation. This Don Juan, whom the tale follows from boyhood, is a romantic who always yearns for true love and is more the object of seduction than the seducer; when he is drawn into purely sexual adventures, it is always by circumstance and more or less in spite of himself. (As Byron puts it: “There was the purest Platonism at bottom/Of all his feelings—only he forgot ’em.”) His first love for a married woman from whom he is forcibly separated when her husband discovers their affair is followed by a voyage abroad, then shipwreck, and then pirates, enslavement, a Turkish harem, the bloody Russian siege and conquest of the Ismail fortress, a sojourn at the court of Catherine the Great (where Juan, at 18 or so, becomes the latest boy toy to the Empress, still “in juicy vigor” at 48), and a diplomatic mission to England.
It is certainly not all fun and games. The narrative includes the poignant episode of Juan’s romance with the Greek maiden Haidée, a pirate’s daughter who rescues the shipwrecked Juan and shares with him an innocently erotic, ultimately doomed idyll: Her father returns, Juan is sold into slavery, and Haidée, whose defiant attempt to defend her lover is no match for her father’s strength, is shocked into a semi-catatonic state in which she dies a few days later. The scenes at Ismail are harrowing in their depiction of war and pillage, and there’s a moving subplot in which Juan adopts an orphaned Turkish 10-year-old, Leila5:
He naturally loved what he protected: And thus they form’d a rather curious pair, A guardian green in years, a ward connected In neither clime, time, blood, with her defender; And yet this want of ties made theirs more tender.
But it’s ultimately the humor—rollicking, bawdy, sharp, flippant, irreverent, full of unpredictable twists, unexpected insights—and the verbal pyrotechnics that make it work. This is, after all, an epic in which a canto begins with the words, “Hail, Muse! Et cetera.” This is an epic in which the enslaved Juan’s dramatic rejection of a sultana’s sexual overtures takes this turn:
Her first thought was to cut off Juan’s head; Her second, to cut only his—acquaintance; Her third, to ask him where he had been bred; Her fourth, to rally him into repentance; Her fifth, to call her maids and go to bed; Her sixth, to stab herself; her seventh, to sentence The lash to Baba:—but her grand resource Was to sit down again, and cry of course.
(It’s that dash before “acquaintance” that raises this stanza to a truly sublime level. “Baba,” by the way, is the eunuch who smuggled Juan into the palace.)
Or consider this little gem from the scene between Juan and Catherine:
Well, we won’t analyse—our story must Tell for itself: the sovereign was smitten, Juan much flatter’d by her love, or lust;— I cannot stop to alter words once written, And the two are so mix’d with human dust, That he who names one, both perchance may hit on.
As the story goes on, the narrator keeps interrupting it, and himself, with reflections on everything from politics to food to philosophy to war to marriage. This omnipresent “I” has a fluid identity, at first appearing as a bachelor friend of Juan’s family, then unmistakably as Byron himself, making observations about contemporary events and arguing with critics. A reference to a meal segues into a witty passage challenging the idea that eating should improve your mood, since in fact digestion reminds us of our bondage to the physical—and that segues into the narrator’s story about witnessing the death of a military commandant gunned down near his house and being overcome by thoughts of mortality. But never mind: “let us to the story as before.”
Don Juan also integrates, more than any other work, Byron the poet and Byron the freedom lover, not just because of the poem’s hard-hitting political passages but because of its unfettered and voracious spirit. In a recent study, University of Glasgow professor emeritus Richard Cronin considers the poem a powerful affirmation of the pluralism, dynamic flux, and barrier-smashing of modernity, calling it the “liberal epic of the nineteenth century.”
Byron told Murray that he intended to take his epic into the French Revolution; what he would have done with it, and with Juan, we’ll never know. Canto XVII breaks off after just fourteen stanzas, with the penultimate one beginning, uncannily, with “I leave the thing a problem, like all things.” One can lament the loss, or be grateful for the treasure we have, along with Byron’s other mature masterpieces. Besides Manfred and Beppo, there is the verse drama Cain, which turns the biblical story of the world’s first murderer into a tale of a tormented rebel seeking answers to his questions about life, death, God, and justice. There’s the haunting apocalyptic poem Darkness which imagines a desolate, dying Earth after the extinction of the sun. There are the scathing political satires A Vision of Judgment and The Age of Bronze. There is, finally, the marvelous miscellany, from incidental humorous pieces (such as “Dear Doctor, I have read your play,” dashed off in response to a request from the publisher Murray to draft a polite rejection letter to Polidori) to superb lyrical poetry (such as “Stanzas to Augusta”) to, finally, letters that one scholar recently ranked among “great monuments of English Romantic prose.”
HOW DOES BYRON’S LITERARY AFTERLIFE hold up against twenty-first-century cultural politics? In a blog post last year, Cronin mentioned being told about a young lecturer who agreed to teach a course on the Romantics only if she could be “excused from teaching Byron.” Recent indictments of Byron for both literary and real-life misogyny include the 2018 book Byron’s Women by British journalist Alexander Larman, explicitly intended as a post-#MeToo takedown. One writer lamented in 2022 her own inability to let go of her love for Byron’s work despite his “rapey, incestuous life” and “next-level white male privilege.”
And yet the bicentennial tributes suggest that such critiques have failed to make a serious dent in the Byron mystique. For starters, situating the poet’s life in a modern framework of “privilege” is tricky. His disability—the limp which he trained himself to conceal so that it wasn’t readily visible, but which was nonetheless a constant source of self-consciousness and insecurity—should surely count for something. So should his history as a survivor of physical and emotional abuse, and likely of child sexual abuse. So should his bisexuality, in an era when men were not only imprisoned but still occasionally hanged for sodomy. When Lady Caroline Lamb bruited it about in 1816, probably with Lady Byron’s help, that Byron had confessed to homosexual liaisons, it’s not immediately clear where that fits in the oppressor/oppressed hierarchy.
As for misogyny in Byron’s work and life, here, as with most things, Byron is a protean creature of paradox. He took some shots, both in his letters and in his poetry, at intellectual women, and even remarked in an 1821 diary entry that women should be educated to “read neither poetry nor politics—nothing but books of piety and cookery” (possibly a twitch of resentment toward Annabella, to whom most of his gibes at “female wits” seem to be connected). Yet he had, throughout his life, both relationships and close friendships with intelligent and educated women, Guiccioli among them; indeed, another entry in the same diary talks about his literary discussions with Teresa and acknowledges the persuasiveness of her arguments. His friends included the French writer Germaine de Staël; he liked and genuinely admired Mary Shelley, who was immensely grateful for his friendship and support after Shelley’s death in a boating accident in 1822. When he wrote of his daughter, “I hope that the Gods have made her anything save poetical,” it was not because she was a girl but because “it is enough to have one such fool in a family.” His last, unfinished letter thanking Lady Byron for a rare report on almost 7-year-old Ada expressed pleasure at the child’s mechanical ingenuity and boat-building hobby. One suspects that, for all the Annabella-inspired quips about mathematically inclined women, he would have been delighted to learn that his daughter, the Countess of Lovelace by marriage, would be hailed as a female scientific pioneer.
Yes, at times Byron could be shockingly callous toward women; men too (“Dear Doctor, I have read your play” becomes considerably less hilarious when one remembers that taunts from Byron, by whom he desperately wanted to be accepted as an equal, probably helped drive Polidori to suicide), but at least none of those men were the mother of his child, like Annabella or Claire Clairmont. Byron’s treatment of Claire, whom he cut off from all contact with the daughter born from their brief affair as a condition of taking care of the girl, was inexcusably cruel; that he was by all accounts sincerely grief-stricken when 5-year-old Allegra died of an illness at the convent where she was sent for schooling hardly changes that. In view of such behavior, Stauffer’s observation that “Byron gave selfishly to women all his life, often to his own detriment, driven by impulses that sometimes partook of generosity” can be seen as too exculpatory. And yet the real Byron is somewhere in the gap between the image held of him by Mary Shelley, whose lifelong gratitude and admiration was channeled into Byron-like figures in her novels, and her stepsister Claire, who viewed him with unmitigated loathing. Ultimately, even Larman’s Byron’s Women, intended to indict Byron, is forced to acknowledge his complexity.
Likewise with Byron’s work: His verse narratives and plays offer a surprising range of often heroic female characters, who sometimes shocked contemporary reviewers with their unladylike assertiveness and active sexuality. When Don Juan breaks off, it is clearly building toward making Aurora Raby, a bookish, brooding outsider in London’s high society, the hero’s next true love. Of course the epic is not without passages that can make even the least “politically correct” cringe—above all, two jokes that make light of victorious Russian soldiers “ravishing” aging Turkish widows and spinsters in Ismail. (These lines are especially jarring in the wake of real-life sexual violence by invading troops in Ukraine.) But it also has two remarkable long digressions, more trenchant than humorous, about women’s “unnatural situation” in a male-dominated society where “the gilding wears so soon from off her fetter” and where “Man’s very sympathy with their estate / Has much of selfishness, and more suspicion”—a line in which, strikingly, Byron invites us to impugn the motives for his own quasi-feminist reflections.
It is finally useful to remember that when Byron’s words offend, it’s usually because he wants precisely that effect. (You want offensive? Try his mocking epitaphs for Foreign Secretary Robert Castlereagh, whom he detested, after Castlereagh’s suicide in 1822.) As Cambridge scholar Anne Barton pointed out in an essay in 1993—when feminist critiques of Byron were already going strong—some of his sexist lines were intended to be shocking even in his own time. When Don Juan refers to “Catherine’s reign, whom glory still adores / As greatest of all sovereigns—and of whores,” contemporaries were no doubt as scandalized by the obscenity as we are by the misogyny. And we’re nonetheless forced to admit that the abrupt tonal shift from solemnity to smutty vulgarity in the last three words is hilarious and brilliant.
IN AN 1823 CONVERSATION with Margaret, Countess of Blessington—another intellectual female friend—Byron talked about his future biographers:
One will represent me as a sort of sublime misanthrope, with moments of kind feeling. This, par example, is my favorite rôle. Another will portray me as a modern Don Juan; and a third (as it would be hard if a votary of the Muses had less than the number of the Graces for his biographers) will, it is to be hoped, if only for opposition sake, represent me as an amiable, ill-used gentleman, “more sinned against than sinning.”
He basically got it right—though he might not have imagined that he would get at least four biographers in just 2023–24 or that one of them would represent him as a pioneer of queer sexual liberation. One could see Byron, offered a window into modern times, scoffing at the “cant” (one of his favorite words) of critiques that subject him to political purity tests. One could see him being thrilled to find out that he is still a national hero in his beloved Greece—and that high school and college students in an independent Ukraine read Mazeppa in class in a Ukrainian translation. And one could see him delighted and amused to know we are still grappling with the Byron paradox—finding pleasure in the poetry and perplexity in the charming, awful life of the man who wrote it.
One of the more unusual entries in Byron-centric fiction is the 1995 novel The Vampyre (published in the United States as Lord of the Dead), in which Byron himself is an immortal vampire. It is surprisingly well written; the author, British Byronist Tom Holland, would go on to write bestselling histories of Rome and cohost a popular history podcast.
The summer at Villa Diodati has itself been the subject of three movies (Ken Russell’s extremely weird Gothic, Ivan Passer’s Haunted Summer, and Gonzalo Suárez’s Rowing with the Wind), as well as the 2020 Doctor Who episode “The Haunting of Villa Diodati.”
Just in time for the bicentenary, an 1823 letter from society lady and artist Elizabeth Palgrave, who saw portions of the memoirs at Murray’s offices, turned up in a Cambridge archive. Palgrave was shocked, mainly by Byron’s unseemly trashing of his wife and witty but catty portrayals of people in his social circle.
MacCarthy also insists that Byron felt revulsion toward female bodies, particularly after childbearing, based on a line in a letter that refers to Italian women turning “doughy . . . and flumpity in a short time after breeding.” But Byron’s prolific sex life contradicts this claim; for example, Lady Oxford, with whom he was involved in 1812–13, was fourteen years his senior and the mother of six. (A pregnancy by Byron apparently ended in miscarriage.)
The Leila episode echoes a couple of real-life incidents in which Byron took young girls under his wing. There has been (naturally!) speculation about the possible pedophilic nature of his interest in them; but it is noteworthy that in Don Juan, Byron explicitly (and perhaps defensively) pauses to note that Juan’s feelings toward Leila are entirely pure and not like those of an “ancient debauchee” with a taste for prepubescent “sour fruit.”