Byron In Love

Description

Byron, more than any other poet, has come to personify the poet as rebel, imaginative and lawless, reaching beyond race, creed or frontier, his gigantic flaws redeemed by a magnetism and ultimately a heroism that by ending in tragedy raised it and him from the particular to the universal. Everything about Lord George Gordon Byron was a paradox - insider and outsider, beautiful and deformed, serious and facetious, profligate but on occasion miserly and possessed of a fierce intelligence trapped forever in a child's magic and malices. He was also a great poet, but as he reminded us, poetry is a distinct faculty and has little to do with the individual life of its creator. Edna O'Brien's exemplary biography focuses upon the diverse and colourful women in Byron's life.

Since her debut novel THE COUNTRY GIRLS, Edna O'Brien has written over twenty works of fiction along with a biography of James Joyce and Lord Byron. She is the recipient of many awards including the Irish Pen Lifetime Achievement Award, the American National Art's Gold Medal and the Ulysses Medal. Born and raised in the west of Ireland she has lived in London for many years.

'A beguiling blend of sympathy, humour and, of course, her signature lilting style... a delightful, though poignant, account' - MAIL ON SUNDAY 'O'Brien charts the many loves of the notorious nineteenthth-century poet's reckless life in immediate and candid prose' - STELLA 'Reading this compact and hugely enjoyable retelling of his life, one feels the inevitability of the biographer and her subject' - DAILY TELEGRAPH 'Edna O'Brien has always had a gift for writing about affairs of the heart' - GUARDIAN 'There is much to enjoy in this idiosyncratic and highly readable account of the poet whose writing enthralled and whose actions appalled in equal measure' - INDEPENDENT 'Immaculately researched and beautifully written' - CHOICE