Byron: The Flawed Angel

Lisa Vargo is an associate professor of English at the University of
Saskatchewan.

What makes this book—the first full-length study of British poet
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824) since Leslie Marchand’s
three-volume work of 40 years ago—particularly welcome is the fact
that the author had access to the Lovelace Papers. These unpublished
materials, which are concerned with the poet’s separation from his
wife, give voices to the two women who were close to Byron: his
half-sister, Augusta, and his wife, Annabella.

Phyllis Grosskurth has written critically acclaimed biographies of
Havelock Ellis and Melanie Klein, among others. Her central thesis in
this biography is that Byron was a lifelong outsider who was “obsessed
by the conviction that he was a fallen angel” and who spent his life
searching for a home that would give him a sense of security. Having
rejected his mother for her vulgar excess, he sought comfort in a series
of maternal figures, but never found home. After the very public
breakdown of his marriage in 1816, he exiled himself to Italy, engaged
in pleasureless promiscuity, and died tragically in Greece at the age of
36.

This psychoanalytic biography gives a clear sense of Byron’s eventful
life and complex personality, about which Grosskurth is both critical
and sympathetic. Less emphasis is placed on the poetry and on the
reasons it brought Byron such celebrity—though in accounting for the
popularity of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Grosskurth interestingly
records the impressions of Annabella, who was yet to meet her future
husband.