Those, and there are many of us, who balk at the Alpine crags and chasms of the numerous big Byron biographies, may happily take a stroll over the level ground of this unassuming yet impressively comprehensive volume. Stauffer, professor of English at the University of Virginia and president of the Byron Society of America, manages, with the aid of a choice handful of the poet’s vivid and hugely entertaining letters, to fashion a rounded portrait, venereal scars and all, of one of the prime movers of the Romantic movement.
Byron was, as Lady Caroline Lamb famously wrote, “mad, bad and dangerous to know”, but he must also have been, at the simplest level, wonderful company. How seriously the Keatses and the Shelleys and the Wordsworths took themselves; not George Gordon, 6th Baron Byron. As he wrote to one of his female intimates: “There is no comedy after all like real life.”
