Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Important Literary Work, 14 Oct 2005
By A Customer
Jude Morgan's "Passion" not only is a moving and powerful novel in itself, but also gives a deep insight into the lives of the three great second-generation Romantic poets, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, as well as the various women in their lives. Using a variety of narrative techniques, it moves well inside the minds of its characters, particularly of the women, to illuminate a sequence of highly emotional, romantic, and often scandalous relationships that were the delight and the horror of early nineteenth-century England, and, indeed, of most of Europe. Byron's incestuous relationship with his half-sister, Shelley's abandonment of his wife in order to live with his lover, Keats's unfulfilled longing for a woman he would never attain -- all these are presented with full honesty yet with profound sympathy as well. Only Annabella Millbank, Byron's wife, is presented as having little admirable or likeable about her, and biographical evidence appears to support this depiction. The novel is not the easiest reading with its shifting viewpoints and its wide array of narrative devices. Nor is it, at nearly 700 pages, a short work. But it well repays the time and effort it demands. It is quite simply the finest book on the subject that I have ever encountered, more informative than most straight biographies, more enlightening than most literary studies, and more enjoyable than most historical novels. Don't miss it.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A group of Romantics brought vividly to life, 6 April 2007
At 663 pages this is an extremely long book - but then it more or less has to be, for Morgan's huge ambition is that it should describe the lives and complex relationships of no fewer than seven central characters: Augusta Leigh, half-sister of Lord Byron, with whom she had an incestuous relationship; Caroline Lamb, wife of the future Prime Minister Lord Melbourne and who also had an affaire with Byron; Claire Claremont, who bore one illegitimate daughter to Byron and (possibly)another to Shelley (though in this novel the suggestion is that the mother was not Claire but a nursemaid for Shelley's other children); Claire's step-sister Mary, both of whom eloped with the then still married Shelley and lived in an uneasy ménage à trois with him, even after Shelley and Mary were able to marry; and Fanny Brawne, engaged to Shelley's friend John Keats. (This last relationship, touching though it is, is rather marginal to the intricate web that connects the other characters in the book.)
The lives of these women, from childhood onwards, are told in alternating sections, and it is only quite late in the novel that one gets a sense of how they are all interconnected. Augusta, Caroline and Mary (and Byron himself) each have a complicated network of relatives, and the book would certainly have benefitted from a series of family trees, which the reader has to construct for himself. Their stories are told against a richly detailed social and political background of the period (from the 1780s to the 1820s), including such information as that the gentry above-stairs had the rooms lit by candles in the evening, while below-stairs they were lit by rushes - that sort of thing.
The women in this novel have all grown up in the period of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. They are women of great character, sparklingly articulate and willing to be unconventional. `Society' disapproved when their unconventional behaviour was too public (their parents' and even their grandparents' generation had themselves challenged conventions in their time), but the disapproval was nothing like as stifling as it would be during the next two or three generations, in the Victorian Age - when the `cant' so excoriated by Byron got the upper hand: the thesis also of Ben Wilson's new book `Decency and Disorder, 1789 to 1837'. And yet the women do suffer, not so much from society's disapproval which they do not much mind, but Caroline, Augusta and Claire for having given their hearts to Byron, and Mary for having given her heart to Shelley. Shelley emerges in this novel as having given a soft heart to too many women; Byron as possibly having loved Augusta but really none of the other women of whose infatuation with him he took advantage, only to cast them off when he had tired of them. He really was a shocker; but one comes to understand how he was driven by his daemon: at one point he says that the first thing he truly hates is himself.
At the end we have sorrow upon sorrow as deaths fall like hammer-blows: the deaths of young children, and the early deaths of the three men: Keats, then Shelley, then Byron. And the women are left to mourn. But they cherish the memories of the men, and there is some comfort in that. Morgan is good throughout - but in these last pages he excels himself.
Some readers may be put off a little by his somewhat idiosyncratic style: in the childhood chapters verging occasionally on archness; many sentences without main verbs; shifts between the historic present and the past tense; an occasional pastiche of 19th century prose; sometimes the characters address the reader directly; - but the writing is hugely intelligent and always pacey; the descriptive writing is very good, and the dialogues and the delineation of characters are very well done. The way the relationship between Byron and Augusta is portrayed is an especial highlight of the book.
The historical facts of all these relationships are truly `stranger than fiction'. This historical fiction is very close to the historical facts, and it makes for a compelling and informative read.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Remarkable Literary Insight, 15 Oct 2005
By A Customer
Jude Morgan's "Passion" not only is a moving and powerful novel in itself, but also gives a deep insight into the lives of the three great second-generation Romantic poets, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, as well as the various women in their lives. Using a variety of narrative techniques, it moves well inside the minds of its characters, particularly of the women, to illuminate a sequence of highly emotional, romantic, and often scandalous relationships that were the delight and the horror of early nineteenth-century England, and, indeed, of most of Europe. Byron's incestuous relationship with his half-sister, Shelley's abandonment of his wife in order to live with his lover, Keats's unfulfilled longing for a woman he would never attain -- all these are presented with full honesty yet with profound sympathy as well. Only Annabella Millbank, Byron's wife, is presented as having little admirable or likeable about her, and biographical evidence appears to support this depiction. The novel is not the easiest reading with its shifting viewpoints and its wide array of narrative devices. Nor is it, at nearly 700 pages, a short work. But it well repays the time and effort it demands. It is quite simply the finest book on the subject that I have ever encountered, more informative than most straight biographies, more enlightening than most literary studies, and more enjoyable than most historical novels. Don't miss it.
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