Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 29 January 2009.
This is a wonderfully vivid account of the paradoxical life and loves of Lord Byron. It focuses on the women in his life and in particular the notorious ménage à trois between him, his wife and his half-sister.
Byron, more than any other poet, has come to personify the poet as rebel; imaginative and lawless, reaching beyond race, creed or frontier, his notorious flaws redeemed by a magnetism and ultimately a heroism that by ending in tragedy raised it and him from the particular to the universal.
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 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 exemplary biography focuses upon the diverse and colourful women in Byron's life.
'O'Brien charts the many loves of the notorious 19th-century poet's reckless life in immediate and candid prose' Sunday Telegraph
'Edna O'Brien has always had a gift for writing about affairs of the heart' Guardian
'There is much to enjoy in this idiosyncratic and highly readable account of the poet whose writing enthralled and whose actions appalled in equal measure' Independent
"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
Author
About Edna O'Brien
Since her debut novel The Country GirlsEdna O'Brien has written over twenty works of fiction along with a biography of James Joyce and Lord Byron. She is the recipient of many awards including the Irish Pen Lifetime Achievement Award, the American National Art's Gold Medal and the Ulysses Medal. Born and raised in the west of Ireland she has lived in London for many years.
