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Biography 23.3 (2000) 558-560



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Frances Wilson, ed. Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's, 1999. 234 pp. ISBN 0-312-21220-8, $55.00.
The art of autobiography is difficult enough for people who have a reasonably straightforward sense of the subject as, if not Cartesian cogito, at least as an individual who knows himself better than anyone else can know him. But Byron understands that anyone who has become "the object of so many contradictory comparisons must probably be like something different from them all," but what that is he defies anyone, including himself, to say. (186)

James Soderholm makes this statement in the course of his essay in this volume, writing specifically on the confessional mode of Byron's poetry. But his statement serves as a comment on biography too, and suggests why Byron might be an appropriate subject for biographical study at the turn of this century. Given the increasing self-reflexivity in all modes of contemporary writing, biography's attempt to represent the subject most easily calls itself into question when it addresses such a slippery self-publicist as Byron. Byron's own self-consciousness, the knowing ways in which he fashioned and represented his public image, made him aware of the ways in which fame is fashioned long before the late twentieth century made all of us adroit at reading, if not at writing, media images. Byron's writings were phenomenally popular in his own time (that statistic about The Corsair selling ten thousand copies in one day is deservedly well known). Byron himself was a phenomenon too. Elizabeth, Duchess of Devonshire, commented that not even the Napoleonic wars then raging across the Channel could rival him for attention: "The subject of conversation, of curiosity, or enthusiasm almost, one might say, of the moment, is not Spain or Portugal, Warriors or Patriots, but Lord Byron!" But most fascinating of all is the way in which writing and biography were intermixed. Deserting his wife, or having an incestuous affair with his sister, might have been scandalous enough activities in themselves for Regency England. But to hint flippantly of these and other crimes in his writings, as even the fashionable Tales had done with their haunted, guilty Byronic heroes, was to raise scandal to an art.

Since then, biographies of Byron have been as frequent as literary reviews of his writing. But most biographies have been unable to examine the particular interrelationship of life and art, reading the works sometimes as incidental to the extraordinary narrative of the life of this lover of women (and more rarely, of men), this fighter for Greek Independence, and sometimes as (over)literal encodements of Byron's motives and opinions. The more sensitive and supple of the biographical readings have come from [End Page 558] Byron's best literary critics--and from Jerome McGann especially, whose meticulous recreation of textual and bibliographical research has given us more persuasive glimpses of the "real" Byron, in all his mixture of duplicity, theatricality, and materiality than lengthier biographies. McGann's definition of "Byronic masquerade," for example, ought to be cited by all who write of the "real Lord Byron": "a theatrical display in which personae are manipulated so that we have difficulty distinguishing figure from ground because the presumptive ground, 'the real Lord Byron,' becomes a figural form in the poetry" (40).

This volume of essays adheres to the spirit of this Byronic masquerade, as well as to the cultural materialism which is its theoretical or critical equivalent, in considering the representations by which Byron has been and continues to be known. The eleven essays here range from fictional versions of Byron in his own lifetime (and particularly Caroline Lamb's Glenarvon), visual representations in portraiture and cartoons, and Byron's self-dramatization in his poetry, to images of Byron in silver-fork novels of the Victorian period, in the conventions of vampire fiction, and in twentieth-century bioplays and film biopics. Here the strengths and weaknesses of collections...

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