Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame Book

In this masterful portrait of the poet who dazzled an era and prefigured the modern age of celebrity, noted biographer Benita Eisler offers a fuller and more complex vision than we have yet been afforded of George Gordon, Lord Byron.

Eisler reexamines his poetic achievement in the context of his extraordinary life: the shameful and traumatic childhood; the swashbuckling adventures in the East; the instant stardom achieved with the publication ofChilde Harold's Pilgrimage; his passionate and destructive love affairs, including an incestuous liaison with his half-sister; and finally his tragic death in the cause of Greek independence. This magnificent record of a towering figure is sure to become the new standard biography of Byron.

Claude Rawson

Being a lord was more important than being a writer, as Benita Eisler points out...in this lively biography....Eisler's account of Byron's appalling marriage and its termination is a page-turner....This book astutely identifies links between Byron's defiance of prevailing moral codes and his poilitical radicalism... —The New York Times Book Review