![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() It’s too long to be a monograph but too short to be a full-dress study it’s a protracted swoon, with an index.Īs is perhaps not surprising in a novelist (a certain type of novelist, at any rate), O’Brien has a way of making even entirely factual recountings sound like purple passages Georgette Heyer left on the cutting room floor:Īugusta Leigh, Byron’s half-sister and five years his senior, has been variously depicted as scatter-brained, a moral idiot and a schemer, her childhood as fractured and peripatetic as Byron’s own. The latest is by Edna O’Brien (when her author bio-note says “Universally recognized as one of our greatest novelists,” we cringe to recall that all such notes are approved by their subjects prior to use) – and at 216 pages, Byron in Love is an odd breach-birth of a book. So the biographies continue to flow, like dark blood from a leeched patient. Ireland, Dean of Westminster Abbey, was asked by the late poet’s friends about the possibility of Lord Byron taking up a place in Poet’s Corner, they were sternly told, “Carry the body away and say as little about it as possible.” If all would-by Byron biographers had followed that sound advice since his death in 1824, the world would have been spared a great quivering mass of twaddle – but alas, the picaresque contours of the poet’s life make such self-restraint as difficult now as it was in his own day. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |