Lord Byron

[mrkgnao]

I am in a Lord Byron phase. I started with his own The giaour, an epic poem about, actually, a vampire. Then I read Tom Holland’s The vampyre, in which we learn that Ld B was – well, more correctly is – a vampire himself. After that John Crowley’s Lord Byron’s novel: The evening land, about the novel Ld B didn’t write but might have, and the finding of it in the 21st century (and also about his daughter, Ada). Now, parallel with Childe Harold’s pilgrimage, I’m reading Conversations with Lord Byron on perversion, 163 years after his Lordship’s death by Amanda Prantera, in which Ld B is “reborn” as an AI computer program. After that awaits Don Juan, and The memoirs of Lord Byron: a novel by Robert Nye.

All the novels show rather different Byrons, with different takes on primarily his promiscuity and his marriage.
In The vampyre, it’s only natural that he’s “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”, and it is in fact to spare his family that he leaves England. And he is a rake, but to be fair he kills more people than he has sex with.
In Lord Byron’s novel, he’s very sweet and misunderstood really, and his wife was the monster of the two. He didn’t chase women as such, could he help it that they threw themselves at him?
In Conversations…, which I’ve just started on, it seems he’s a rake again, and in The memoirs… there seems to be first and foremost a great deal of sex.

Any Byronians out there? Any suggestions about further books for me to read? I know there are a lot of proper biographies, but I’d prefer novels… Anyone read any of these above and wants to discuss them? And does anyone know of an available Byron collection that includes the entire texts of Childe Harold and Don Juan, and doesn’t cost a fortune?

*mrkgnao*

 

[tundra]

I know they are at least available online... Childe Harold and Don Juan.

A woman should never be seen eating or drinking, unless it be lobster salad and Champagne, the only true feminine & becoming viands. ~Lord Byron

 

[mrkgnao]

I know they are at least available online... Childe Harold and Don Juan.

Yeah, I know, but they're a bit too long to sit at the computer to read...

 

[StillILearn]

Here's the best I can do:

Haunted Summer

 

[mrkgnao]

For the record: Prantera's Byron-book was sort of interesting but a bit on the prude and idealistic side; and Nye's was basically a prolonged biographical note in a literary history - pasted together from quotes from B's letters and journals - with some dirty words and a (not so secret) "secret" thrown in.
So I return to his Lordship himself

*mrkgnao*

 

[Vespertilio91]

Just to totally random about Lord Byron: I was reading a novel called Beyond the Pale in which a young female vampire in the present sometimes recalls her relationship with the famous Lord Byron. She says that she is the reason he died, when she got too carried away and drained him. Don't know why but I had to say that.

p.s. She doesn't ever date again until 250ish years later, so don't think she doesn't regret it.