Leaving aside this oddly insistent attempt to create a particular pedigree for her biography - the Murray archive, after all, has already been made available to previous biographers, including Benita Eisler - MacCarthy has written an excellent book about Byron.

It was in Murray's famous drawing room at Albermarle Street that Byron's executors gathered shortly after his death to burn his scandalous memoirs in a desperate attempt to protect him - and his publisher - from delighted outrage. The thread linking MacCarthy to Marchand is, of course, the fact that both are published by John Murray, the firm most closely associated with Byron's life and work.

Instead MacCarthy draws a line straight from Leslie Marchand's classic biography of 1957 to her own, ignoring anything in between (an impression reinforced by the fact that she includes no bibliography). The two recent full-length biographies, by Phyllis Grosskurth and Benita Eisler, are nowhere mentioned. MacCarthy, however, for all her expressed intention to consider the way in which the Byron myth has been shaped by each new layer of biographical writing, has oddly ignored some of the most obvious. He was, in short, pure rock'n'roll.Īn inevitable product of Byron's weighty presence in English cultural memory has been the unprecedented number of books that continue to be written about him (there is even one forthcoming on his violent diet he was pretty much bulimic).

What's more, with a bit of tweaking, he could be made to stand for every subsequent bad-boy hero of popular history (James Dean owed the sixth Baron Byron more than he realised). Also crucial was the fact that for the previous eight years Byron had been somewhere else - usually hot, always exotic - which meant that it was easier to invent him than if he had been clumping round Piccadilly diddling his creditors.īyron could have been forged on the Romantic template of the day (or perhaps, indeed, he was that template) - the authentic voice crying in the wilderness, the voluntary exile from the mediocrity of so-called civilised society. There was the peerage, the ruined pile of Newstead Abbey, the soft face on the spoiled body, the deranged lovers and the intermittently brilliant poetry.

Fiona maccarthy byron