Lord Byron

Fiona MacCarthy makes a breakthrough in interpreting Byron's life and poetry drawing on John Murray's world-famous archive. She brings a fresh eye to his early years: his childhood in Scotland, embattled relations with his mother, the effect of his deformed foot on his development. She traces his early travels in the Mediterranean and the East, throwing light on his relationships with adolescent boys - a hidden subject in earlier biographies. While paying due attention to the compelling tragicomedy of Byron's marriage, his incestuous love for his half-sister Augusta and the clamorous attention of his female fans, she gives a new importance to his close male friendships, in particular that with his publisher John Murray. She tells the full story of their famous disagreement, ending as a rift between them as Byron's poetry became more recklessly controversial. Byron was a celebrity in his own lifetime, becoming a 'superstar' in 1812, after the publication of Childe Harold. The Byron legend grew to unprecedented proportions after his death in the Greek War of Independence at the age of thirty-six. The problem for a biographer is sifting the truth from the sentimental, the self-serving and the spurious. Fiona MacCarthy has overcome this to produce an immaculately researched biography, which is also her refreshing personal view.

The great Romantic poet Lord Byron starved himself compulsively for most of his life. His behaviour mystified his friends and other witnesses, yet he never imagined he was ill. Instead, he rationalised his behaviour as a fight for spiritual freedom and made it the cornerstone of his heroic ideal, which was central to his work and to his life and his death. This fresh biographical study aims to explore neglected or misunderstood aspects of his private life to illuminate his writing, his affairs with women, his passion for Napoleon and his conflicted friendships with Coleridge and Shelley. This in turn leads to a new understanding of his masterpiece, Don Juan. 15 July 2019 marks the 200th anniversary of its first publication. Antony Peattie situates these patterns of behaviour in a vividly rendered contemporary world, culminating in Byron’s last days in Greece, where he tried to starve himself into heroic leadership but damaged his constitution, resulting in his death at the age of thirty-six.

A Sunday Times Book of the Year Shortlisted for The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize 'This magnificent, highly readable double biography...brings these two driven, complicated women vividly to life' The Financial Times 'A gripping saga of a double-biography' Daily Mail 'A masterful portrait' The Times 'Vastly enjoyable' Literary Review 'Deeply absorbing and meticulously researched' The Oldie In 1815, the clever, courted and cherished Annabella Milbanke married the notorious and brilliant Lord Byron. Just one year later, she fled, taking with her their baby daughter, the future Ada Lovelace. Byron himself escaped into exile and died as a revolutionary hero in 1824, aged 36. The one thing he had asked his wife to do was to make sure that their daughter never became a poet. Ada didn't. Brought up by a mother who became one of the most progressive reformers of Victorian England, Byron's little girl was introduced to mathematics as a means of calming her wild spirits. Educated by some of the most learned minds in England, she combined that scholarly discipline with a rebellious heart and a visionary imagination. As a child invalid, Ada dreamed of building a steam-driven flying horse. As an exuberant and boldly unconventional young woman, she amplified her explanations of Charles Babbage's unbuilt calculating engine to predict, as nobody would do for another century, the dawn today of our modern computer age. When Ada died - like her father, she was only 36 - great things seemed still to lie ahead for her as a passionate astronomer. Even while mired in debt from gambling and crippled by cancer, she was frenetically employing Faraday's experiments with light refraction to explore the analysis of distant stars. Drawing on fascinating new material, Seymour reveals the ways in which Byron, long after his death, continued to shape the lives and reputations both of his wife and his daughter. During her life, Lady Byron was praised as a paragon of virtue; within ten years of her death, she was vilified as a disgrace to her sex. Well over a hundred years later, Annabella Milbanke is still perceived as a prudish wife and cruelly controlling mother. But her hidden devotion to Byron and her tender ambitions for his mercurial, brilliant daughter reveal a deeply complex but unsuspectedly sympathetic personality. Miranda Seymour has written a masterful portrait of two remarkable women, revealing how two turbulent lives were often governed and always haunted by the dangerously enchanting, quicksilver spirit of that extraordinary father whom Ada never knew.

This meticulously edited collection is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents: The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 1: Fugitive Pieces Poems on Various Occasions Hours of Idleness: Damœtas To Marion Oscar of Alva From Anacreon Lachin y Gair To Romance The Death of Calmar and Orla Poems Original and Translated Early Poems from Various Sources The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 2: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 3: Poems 1809–1813 The Giaour The Bride of Abydos The Corsair Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte Lara Hebrew Melodies: She walks in Beauty The Harp the Monarch Minstrel swept If that High World The Wild Gazelle Oh! weep for those On Jordan's Banks Jeptha's Daughter Oh! snatched away in Beauty's Bloom My Soul is Dark I saw thee weep Thy Days are done Saul Song of Saul before his Last Battle "All is Vanity, saith the Preacher" When Coldness wraps this Suffering Clay Vision of Belshazzar Sun of the Sleepless! Were my Bosom as False as thou deem'st it to be Herod's Lament for Mariamne On the Day of the Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus By the Rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept "By the Waters of Babylon" The Destruction of Sennacherib... A Spirit passed before me Poems 1814–1816 The Siege of Corinth Parisina Poems of the Separation The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 4: The Prisoner of Chillon Poems of July—September, 1816: The Dream Darkness Churchill's Grave Prometheus Monody on the Death of the Right Hon. R. B. Sheridan Manfred The Lament of Tasso Beppo Ode on Venice Mazeppa The Prophecy of Dante The Morgante Maggiore of Pulci Francesca of Rimini Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice The Vision of Judgment Poems 1816-1823 The Blues The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 5: Sardanapalus The Two Foscari Cain Heaven and Earth Werner; or, The Inheritance The Deformed Transformed The Age of Bronze The Island The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 6: Don Juan The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7: Jeux d'Esprit and Minor Poems, 1798–1824: Letters and Journals of Lord Byron Biographies: Byron by John Nichol The Life of Lord Byron by John Galt