BYRON IN LOVE

Everything about Lord George Gordon Byron 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 malice, 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. He was 'five feet eight and a half inches in height, had a malformed right foot, chestnut hair, a haunting pallor, temples of alabaster, teeth like pearls, grey eyes fringed with dark lashes and an enchantedness that neither men nor women could resist.' He had many diverse and colourful lovers of both sexes in his life, but it was the love triangle with his wife and half-sister that earned him timeless notoriety. More than any other poet he has come to personify the poet as rebel, imaginative and lawless, his gigantic flaws redeemed by his magnetism. Edna O'Brien's rich and intense portrait follows his passions from Regency London to the wilds of Albania and pleasures of the Mediterranean. We see his early life, bullying mother Catherine Gordon to his famous affairs with Caroline Lamb, Augusta Leigh and Tessa Guinnoci. 228 page paperback.