GLR September-October 2024

the original Byronic man—“mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” in the famous words of Lady Caroline Lamb, one of his many conquests as a “broken dandy” (his own self-description) in the adulterous roundelay of Regency London. Like his father, whose nickname was “Mad Jack,” Byron committed incest, fled abroad to escape his debts, and died at 36—though his father was probably a suicide, while Byron died of a malarial fever in Greece, exacerbated by the bleedings and purges ordered by doctors that Byron detested. He had been mo lested as a child by a nurse who not only imbued him with Scot

colo Giraud. And when he really began to travel—to Greece, Albania, and Turkey—he discovered the pleasures of the Turk ish baths: palaces of “sherbet and sodomy.” But his real enthu siasm was for married women, especially Italian ones. He was attracted to dark skin—and tight vaginas, we learn in one youth ful letter—though he had a phobia about watching women eat. Still, the bisexuality, the incest, the sheer sexual appetite (“I fucked her twice!” every day, he boasts of his first Venetian af fair in a letter to a friend), seem superhuman. Lady Caroline Lamb was not the only one to call Byron

“mad.” Wordsworth said he was insane and warned that his epic poem DonJuan was a threat to the English character. His half-sis ter Augusta assured his estranged wife that Byron was “a maniac .” The poet Percy Shelley called Byron both “mad” and a “genius.” Goethe agreed with the latter. Part of the madness was what seems to

tish Calvinism’s sense of innate sinfulness, but also, when Byron was nine, “used to come to bed to him and play tricks with his person.” This went on for two years before she was discovered and dismissed. His first great love was for a youth named John Edelston, who sang in a private choir created by a friend of Byron’s at Cam

Byron went on to have a yearlong a ff airwitha Greek born French teen ager named Nicolo Giraud when he moved to Athens.

have been a sexual mania. Sex was linked in Byron’s life to what he considered the two pillars of his being: a love of free dom and a hatred of “cant.” Sex was life—“Is it not life,” he asked a friend about something he had just written, “is it not the very thing?”—no matter how many people got hurt in the mêlée. The most touching case was his illegitimate daughter Allegra, who was handed off to various people as a child and finally stashed in a convent, which, at the age of five, she begged her father to visit; instead he left town. This led to a great depression when she died soon after that of cholera

bridge, which led classmates to wonder: “What does he do with those choirboys?” Before that, there was a circle of friends Byron called The Band of Thebes—friends he made at Harrow before matriculating at Cambridge (from which he graduated without ever having to take an exam, simply because he was an aristocrat). Erotic friendships at Harrow were hardly unusual; such crushes were part of an English upper-class education. But Byron went on to have a yearlong affair with a Greek-born French teenager named Nicolo Giraud when he moved to Athens, which was after an affair with his half-sister Augusta in London. The latter caused a scandal. § A NDREW S TAUFFER ’ S extremely readable biography Byron: A Life in Ten Letters is based on a simple but very effective design. Stauffer, who seems to have read everything there is to read about his subject, has selected ten letters (out of 3,000) that Byron wrote at different stages of his tumultuous career, and has then proceeded to tell us what was going on in Byron’s life when he wrote them. In Stauffer’s view, Byron was attracted to taboo sex. The or gies with prostitutes and actresses that he took part in as a young rake were standard fare for the time, but youthful frivolity gave way eventually to adultery with married women, until Caroline Lamb’s vengeful novel about her own obsession with him (along with rumors of sodomy) ruined his reputation in the drawing rooms of London. So he fled to the Continent. In Italy, things were reversed: you could have sex with a woman as long as she was married, but not before, which would ruin her prospects. The love of Byron’s life was an Italian countess whose husband allowed Byron to live with them in one of the many villas Byron moved among over the course of his brief life. Byron was always ambivalent and at times tortured by his failure to achieve what Stauffer sees as his desire for a stable family life. It was this search for a home, in Stauffer’s view, that led Byron to marry the heiress Annabella Milbanke, with whom he had a daughter Ada, who was removed from his influence not long after their marriage, after his half-sister revealed the truth about their affair. Once Byron left England, he was even freer, as an English lord, to do what he wanted. In Athens he had the affair with Ni

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