Few writers are better suited than she is to take his measure, and to plumb his heart (Judith Thurman)
Edna O'Brien and Byron are surely the perfect match.. the novelist has made a portrait of the poet that is admiring, gently ironic, funny and perceptive (John Banville)
Edna O'Brien has always been attracted to writers writing about other writers. And in Byron in Love she has a go herself (Caroline Jowett DAILY EXPRESS)
a beguiling blend of sympathy, humour and, of course, her signature lilting style.. a delightful, though poignant, account (Kathryn Hughes MAIL ON SUNDAY)
O'Brien charts the many loves of the notorious 19th-century poet's reckless life in immediate and candid prose (STELLA, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH)
O'Brien immerses us in the world of the most insatiable romantic ever (HARPERS BAZAAR)
Reading this compact and hugely enjoyable retelling of his life, one feels the inevitability of the biographer and her subject (Nicholas Shakespeare DAILY TELEGRAPH)
Edna O'Brien has always had a gift for writing about affairs of the heart (Jay Parini THE GUARDIAN)
there is much to enjoy in this idiosyncratic and highly readable account of the poet who writing enthralled and whose actions appalled in equal measure (Sarah Burton THE INDEPENDENT)
brilliant and challenging (Peter Lewis DAILY MAIL)
Synopsis
Bryon's name is part of the English language. The word 'Byronic' suggests excess, diabolical deeds and a rebelliousness answering neither to king nor commoner. 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. Lord George Gordon Byron was 5' 8" in height, had a malformed right foot, chestnut hair, a haunting pallor, grey eyes fringed with dark lashes and an enchantedness that neither men nor women could resist. Everything about him 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 vivid biography is beautifully spare, exemplary in its concision, and focuses upon the diverse and colourful women in Byron's life.Its narrative core is the triangular relationship between him, his wife and his half-sister that brought him his timeless notoriety.
About the Author
In more than twenty books, Edna O'Brien has charted the emotional and psychic landscape of her native Ireland. Often criticised in her own country for her outspoken stance, she has forged a universal audience; the San Francisco Chronicle described her as 'a worthy heir to the great Irish forebears in Irish literature', while Le Figaro noted that 'the breathlessness of her language is comparable to Faulkner'. Awards and prizes include the Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, Writers' Guild of Great Britain, Premier Cavour (Italian), American National Arts Gold Medal and Ulysses Medal 2006. Her biography of James Joyce was published in 1999.
