"Byron in Love" Book Review

Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life by Edna O'Brien
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"From one of our greatest novelists comes this luminous portrait of the world’s first literary rock star. 

"Acclaimed biographer of James Joyce, Edna O’Brien has written an intimate biography that suits her fiery and charismatic subject. She follows Byron from the dissipations of Regency London to the wilds of Albania and the Socratic pleasures of Greece and Turkey, culminating in his meteoric rise to fame at the age of twenty-four on the publication of Childe Harold. With her prismatic eye and novelistic style, O’Brien eerily captures the spirit of the man and creates an indelible portrait of Byron that explodes the Romantic myth. From his escapades with John Edleston, the fourteen-year-old Cambridge choir boy, to those with a galaxy of women that included his half-sister, his wife of one year, and the Italian countess who forsook her satyr-like husband for “the peer of England and its greatest poet,” Byron scandalized the world and inspires “Byronmania” to this day. Byron, as brilliantly rendered by O’Brien, is the poet as rebel, imaginative and lawless, and defiantly immortal."

This was an interesting and brief biography. I grabbed it because I have a huge interest in this part of time: authors and the very important people in general are awesome.

I found that I don't like Byron the man at all. He was cowardly, abusive, incestuous, uncaring and unfeeling. He only realized what he should have done with a lot of the people in his life after they died, which makes it look like he really didn't care anyway.

The writer, Edna O'Brien, was kind of annoyingly snobbish with her unexplained French and Italian statements and the way she wrote wasn't very enjoyable. She kept changing tense which was informative at first and then became confusing because I couldn't remember what year it was supposed to be that he was in Italy then Greece. I would've liked more information, but I knew from just looking at the size of the book that there wouldn't be much. She doesn't list any sources at all, which annoys me to no end. Maybe she should just stick with writing fiction.

Ms. O'Brien obviously loved and admired Byron, but after reading this I cannot completely understand why. The only things from him that were any good, were his poetry, which I haven't read so I can't judge it, and his daughter Ada Lovelace (what a beautiful name), one of the first computer programmers I have ever heard of. In fact, "the computer language Ada, created on behalf of the United States Department of Defense, was named after Ada Lovelace. The reference manual for the language was approved on 10 December 1980, and the Department of Defense Military Standard for the language, "MIL-STD-1815", was given the number of the year of her birth. Since 1998, the British Computer Society has awarded a medal in her name[68] and in 2008 initiated an annual competition for women students of computer science." (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Love...)

Interesting man, but if I ever read about him again, I'm going to get a better researched and more informed book about him.

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