Byron: Life And Legend

Fiona McCarthy

Editions

Review

At the launch of this book, John Murray (most unusually) made a speech. It was fitting, for the fortunes of his family firm were built on Byron’s success, and their Byron archive remains central to any research into Byron’s life.  In his speech, John Murray made clear that this book had been commissioned as a narrative of Byron’s life, not as an analysis of his poetry.  He said that he had deliberately sought a writer who, though a distinguished biographer, was not already a Byron expert.  He wanted a fresh approach.  I believe he was, in part, responding to one or two early reviews which had attacked the book for not talking enough about the poetry.

This would be a fair criticism of the life of most poets, but Byron was much more than a poet, and his importance far outreaches his literary achievement.  He was the first international superstar, already famous, or infamous, throughout Europe by the time he was 30.  Not just celebrated among the chattering classes of the day, but talked about by everyone.  His celebrity was of course founded on his influence as a poet, which was real enough – the Corsair was iconoclastic and swashbuckling, promising individual freedoms of every kind.  And his sexual notoriety affirmed the promise of freedoms expressed in the poetry.  But it was his late championing of Greek independence which added weight to his reputation, endowed his frivolity with significance.

Fiona MacCarthy had access of an unprecedented kind to the Byron archive.  What this means is that the times are now such that there is no need to conceal any of Byron’s sexual antics.  Leslie Marchand was well aware of Byron’s homosexuality when he wrote his 3-vol biography in the Sixties but judged discussion of it to be still inappropriate (pre-Wolfenden); Harold Nicolson chose not to be aware.  Although it has been well known in a vague way, Murray has allowed Byron to be fully outed in this biography, and there is no doubt that MacCarthy has done a superb job.  I enjoyed the book tremendously, and in the closing chapters recounting his Greek involvement MacCarthy manages to make some of his earlier sensational behaviour acquire a retrospective coherence which Byron himself could not find at the time. It is extremely moving and illuminating. - review by Johnny de Falbe