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29 Byron Biographies, 1824 to the Present The Shaping of Byron’s Legacy
Get accessJonathan Gross is Professor of English at DePaul University. He is the author of Byron: The Erotic Liberal (2000), The Life of Anne Damer: Portrait of a Regency Artist (2013), and Byron’s Corbeau Blanc: The Life and Letters of Lady Melbourne (1997). His most recent work is Words of the Prophets: Graffiti as Political Protest in Greece, Italy, Poland, and the United States (2023).
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Published:22 October 2024
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Abstract
This chapter demonstrates that Byron’s biographies often reflect the time in which they were written and the preoccupations of the biographer. It explores the score-settling of Lady Caroline Lamb, Leigh Hunt, Lady Blessington, and Thomas Medwin, and defences by Mary Shelley, Teresa Guiccioli, Edward Trelawny, and James Kennedy. It proposes that of the early biographies, it was Thomas Moore’s that presented Byron dispassionately and most effectively rescued him from denigrators. The chapter then assesses the significance of Leslie Marchand’s biography in returning Byron to serious literary consideration in 1957, and the later preoccupation with Byron’s sexuality in the biographies by Phyllis Grosskurth, Benita Eisler, and Fiona MacCarthy amongst others. It suggests that recent biographers have tended to fan the flames of the perceived controversies of Byron’s life to sell their books.
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