On the 200th anniversary of his death, two new books explore the life and work of the poet who inspired the Byronic hero — proud, introspective and magnetic.
On April 19, 1824, Lord Byron died at Missolonghi, where he had gone to lend his name and give financial support to the Greek war for independence from the Ottoman Empire. After being drenched by a sudden rainstorm while out riding, the poet developed a fever, from which he might well have recovered had it not been for some disastrous medical treatment, chiefly bleeding with leeches that left him weak and dehydrated. He was just 36.
Byron was born in 1788 with a slightly deformed foot, about which he remained sensitive his whole life. His birth name was George Gordon, but following the deaths of two relatives, he suddenly inherited a title and a new name, considerable wealth, and a dilapidated medieval pile called Newstead Abbey. There, he would throw orgiastic, mildly sacrilegious parties with his classmates from Harrow and Cambridge, who would dress as monks and call their host the Abbot.
Byron’s scandalous affairs and defiant flouting of hypocritical conventions — “I was born for opposition”-- soon led to his becoming a social outcast, and he left Britain for good in 1816. En route to Italy, he passed a summer on Lake Geneva at the Villa Diodati in the company of his doctor, William Polidori, and the irregular couple Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin Shelley, as well as Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont, already pregnant with Byron’s child.
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