Delete
|
Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame
[Buy it!] | Eisler, Benita | USD 18.50
(Thu May 23 00:26:10 2024) | Abebooks | Mnemosyne | ISBN10: 0679412999, ISBN13: 9780679412991, [publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, Borzoi Books, Random House, Inc., New York] Hardcover First Edition Benita Eisler's Byron is a masterful portrait of the poet who dazzled an era & prefigured the modern age of celebrity: an absorbing, illuminating, & wonderfully entertaining account of Lord Byron's spectacular life, monumental work, & lasting heroic legacy. Drawing on previously unavailable material -(including family papers only recently brought to light)- Eisler offers us a more complex vision of Byron than any we've had before: a man who rose from the depths of poverty & the humiliation of childhood lameness to a pinnacle of success & fame unlike anything the world had ever seen, & whose bravura identity as renegade aristocrat, political revolutionary, mythic lover, & Romanticism's galvanizing hero & antihero was surpassed in brilliance only by his poetic genius. W/ grace, erudition, & insight, Eisler captures the passions & obsessions that consumed Byron, the fierce devotions & the outsized ego that fired his work, & the despair & self-loathing that plagued his short life. Eisler gives us a richly detailed drama of a childhood of abandonment & shame; of Byron's early days at Harrow & Cambridge; of his humiliating entry into the House of Lords at 18; of his adventures in the East, where he consorted w/ pashas & prostitutes; of his relationships w/ his contemporaries, among them the 24-year-old Shelley & his wife, Mary; of the instant celebrity that attended the publication of the first cantos of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage"; & of the almost vengeful determination w/ which Byron recast himself as the elegant figure that glided through Regency drawing rooms, plotted w/ Italian Carbonari, loved men & women, & drew sensation to him like a cloak until his death, alone & in exile, at the age of 36. Here also are the first in-depth portraits of the women -(and men)- Byron loved: his guilty relations w/ John Edleston, a young Cambridge chorister; his tempestuous affair w/ Lady Caroline Lamb, who was driven to madness by her love for him; his catastrophic marriage to the lovely Annabella Milbanke; his passionate incestuous relationship w/ his half sister, Augusta, & the tormented menage a trois they shared w/ his young wife; & the gentler love of his later life, Teresa Guiccioli, whom he abandoned for his life's last adventure in Missolonghi. Throughout, Eisler offers incisive analysis of Byron's poetry in the context of his extraordinary life -(as hero & martyr, aristocratic aesthete & dandy, transgressive rebel fueled by forbidden substances & exiled for forbidden passions)- examining in detail the stanzas that inspired his own & succeeding generations as no other writer has since Shakespeare. A magnificent record of a towering figure, sure to stand as the definitive biography for years to come. HIGH CRITICAL PRAISE: "Quite simply the best life of Byron we have." -David Crane, Literary Review . . . "Benita Eisler's biography of Byron is a fascinating portrait, filled w/ vivid details, of a dramatic life & her incisive analysis of his work reminds us of his greatness as a poet." -Robert A. Caro
[New Haven, CT, U.S.A.] [Publication Year: 1999] |
