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MODULE B - George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) (p. 96)

TASK
Read the text below and make notes about Byron's life and works.

Byron was descended from two aristocratic families and, at the age of ten, he inherited the title of the sixth Lord Byron. He was educated at Harrow School, then Trinity College, Cambridge. He had been born with a clubfoot, which was made worse by inept medical treatment, and this defect all his life caused him physical suffering and agonized embarrassment. His lameness made him avid for athletic prowess; he played cricket and made himself an expert boxer, fencer, and horseman and a powerful swimmer. […]
Both at Cambridge and at his ancestral estate of Newstead, he engaged with more than ordinary zeal in the expensive pursuits and fashionable dissipations of a young Regency lord. As a result, despite a sizable and increasing income, he got into financial difficulties from which he did not entirely extricate himself until late in his life. […]
After attaining his M.A. degree and his majority, Byron set out in 1809 on a tour through Portugal and Spain to Malta, and then to little-known Albania, Greece and Asia Minor. In this adventurous two-year excursion, he accumulated material that he wove into most of his important poems, including his last work, Don Juan. The first literary product was Childe Harold; he wrote the opening two cantos while on the tour that the poem describes, published them in 1812 soon after his return to England and became the celebrity of fashionable London, enjoying an unprecedented literary success.[…]
In the meantime he found himself besieged by women and entered into a sequence of liaisons with ladies of fashion. However, he married a naïve, unworldly, intellectual woman, Annabella Milbanke, who gave him a daughter, Augusta Ada. After only one year the union ended in a legal separation. The final blow came when Lady Byron discovered her husband's incestuous relations with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. The two had been raised apart, so that they were almost strangers when they met as adults. Byron's affection for his sister, however guilty, was genuine and endured all through his life. Owing to this affair, Byron was ostracized by all but a few friends and was finally forced to leave England forever on April 25, 1816.
Byron now resumed the travels incorporated in the third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold. At Geneva he lived for several months in close and intellectually fruitful relation to Shelley, who was accompanied by his wife and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, who in January 1817 bore him a daughter, Allegra. In the fall of 1817 Byron established himself in Venice and went through a period of frenzied debauchery that, he estimated, involved more than two hundred women. This period was also one of great literary creativity: often working through the later hours of the night, he finished his tragedy Manfred, wrote the fourth canto of Childe Harold and began the composition of Don Juan.
Exhausted and bored by promiscuity, Byron in 1819 settled into a placid and relatively faithful relationship with Teresa Guiccioli, the young wife of the elderly Count Alessandro Guiccioli. Through the countess' nationalistic family, the Gambas, Byron became involved in the Carbonari plot against Austrian control over northern Italy. When the Gambas were forced by the authorities to move to Pisa, Byron followed them there and, for the second time, joined Shelley. During this period, he went on working on Don Juan, until, after Shelley's death, he broke off literature for action and organized an expedition to assist in the Greek war for independence from the Turks. He died at Missolonghi after a series of feverish attacks, just after he had reached his thirty-sixth birthday.
Byron achieved an immense European reputation during his own lifetime and through much of the nineteenth century he continued to be rated as one of the greatest of English poets and the very prototype of literary Romanticism.

(Abridged from The Norton Anthology of English Literature, W.W. Norton & Company, New York and London 1996.)