His own best biographer

Byron in Love, by Edna O’Brien

‘We would entreat him to believe that a certain portion of liveliness, somewhat of fancy, is necessary to constitute a poem,’ wrote Henry Brougham in the Edinburgh Review, when the young Byron was unwise enough to expose his first, dismal book of juvenilia to the gaze of ‘Citizen Mob’,

‘and that a poem in the present day, to be read, must contain at least one thought, either in a little degree different from the ideas of former writers or differently expressed’.

It is as well for a lot of us that there seem to be different standards for biographers ,because there can be even less to be said for a new book about Byron than there is for most literary retreads. Over the last decade Benita Eisler and Fiona MacCarthy have both brought out massive volumes on him, and if you toss in Phyllis Grosskurth’s 1997 The Flawed Angel (a bagatelle at 500-odd pages), Ian Gilmour and an unending stream of academic criticism, the question Edna O’Brien asks herself — ‘So why another book on Byron?’ — presents itself with rather more force than her

unashamedly self-indulgent answer might suggest. ‘Years ago, upon reading a remark of Lady Blessington that Byron was “the most extraordinary and terrifying person [she had] ever met”, I was immediately drawn to him,’ she writes in her Introduction.

Writers writing about other artists has always appealed to me — Rilke on Rodin . . .Virginia Woolf’s Common Reader providing those quick, deft glimpses that give us the human quotidian and the whiff of genius within . . . 

   Similarly, with Byron, I wanted to follow him in his Rake’s Progress and his Poet’s Progress, playing billiards in an English country house and passing clandestine notes to a young bride .