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George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)

LINKS

http://www.rc.umd.edu/reference/byronchronology/index.html

This link connects you to The Byron Chronology edited by Ann R. Hawkins and hosted by Romantics Circles.

http://www.raindog.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/byronsoc/

This link connects you to The Byron Society home page. There you will find many resources on Byron including an extensive list of online links to other Byron sites.

BIOGRAPHY

A contemporary of English romantic poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, Lord Byron cut an unconventional and at times heroic character. His mother's side of the family traced its aristocratic roots back to King James I. Byron's father, the infamous captain "Mad Jack" Byron, abandoned the family to escape his creditors when the poet was three years old. Raised with his mother in Scotland, Byron at age ten inherited his great-uncle's title and estates. Returning to England, Byron was tutored in Nottingham and in 1801 attended Harrow and later Trinity College, where he published in 1807 two verse volumes: Fugitive Pieces and Hours of Idleness. Assuming his seat in the House of Lords in 1809, Byron responded to his harsh critics by publishing an anonymous satire English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. A tour of Portugal, Spain, Malta, Albania, and Greece provided material for his autobiographical poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which won Byron a broad readership when it was published in 1812. Of his new-found popularity, he later remarked, "I awoke one morning and found myself famous." A series of affairs culminated in Byron's troubled marriage to Anabella Milbanke in 1815. Due to mounting debt and temperamental differences with his wife, Byron left England for Europe, never to return. Touring with Percy and Mary Shelley, Byron began an affair with the stepdaughter of William Godwin, Claire Clairmont who would later give birth to Byron's daughter. The type of brooding romantic hero that Byron came to represent was captured in his poetic drama Manfred (1817). By 1818 Byron was composing his great work Don Juan, inspired, in part, by his affairs with a Venetian draper's wife Marianna Segati, then Margarita Cogni, and finally Countess Teresa Guicciolo. Following the Countess to Ravenna, Byron was inducted by her father into the revolutionary secret society of the Carbonari. After Shelley's tragic drowning in 1821, Byron became a committed partisan in the Greek war of independence fromTurkey. Traveling to Greece, Byron financed and participated in the planning for the assault on the Turkish fortress of Lepanto. In 1824, however, after a year spent in Greece, Byron's health steadily declined and after slipping into a coma, he died on April 19, 1824.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Donelan, Charles. Romanticism and Male Fantasy in Byron's Don Juan: A Marketable Vice. New York : St. Martin's Press, 2000.

Eisler, Benita. Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.

Franklin, Caroline. Byron: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.

Garrett, Martin. George Gordon, Lord Byron. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

Gross, Jonathan David. Byron: The Erotic Liberal. Lanham, Md. : Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.

Peters, Catherine. Byron. Stroud, Gloucestershire : Sutton Pub., 2000.

Rawes, Alan. Byron's Poetic Experimentation: Childe Harold, the Tales, and the Quest for Comedy. Brookfield, Vt: Ashgate, 2000.

Stabler, Jane. Byron. New York: Longman, 1998.

SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER