Byron

Reaktion continues its Critical Lives series with this spirited biography of English poet Lord Byron. University of Kent English professor Ellis (The Comic in Shakespeare), begins in 1788 with George Gordon Byron’s birth to a reckless father and quick-tempered mother who left him feeling “starved of affection.” According to Ellis, Byron was theatrical, snobbish, and daring from an early age, qualities that emboldened him to skewer the English literary establishment in his satirical book-length poem English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, published when he was 21. Several years later, the serialized release of Childe Harold, which offered a fictionalized account of the author’s travels through Europe, earned Byron literary fame and entrée to high society parties, where his good looks led to “tempestuous” affairs with men and women, as well as a disastrous marriage to Annabella Milbanke, “a much-cherished only child” who, Ellis suggests, was likely as egotistical as Byron. Accompanied by “a storm of criticism and abuse” over poems that some saw as slighting Milbanke, Byron left England in 1816 to roam around Greece, Switzerland, and Venice, Italy. Along the way, he completed the epic poems Manfred and Don Juan before succumbing to malaria in 1824. Ellis doesn’t skimp on the debauchery and captures the passion and turmoil that marked Byron’s art and life, though there isn’t much here that other Byron biographies haven’t said before. Still, this is a solid introduction to a captivating literary figure. Photos. (Mar.)