The Domestication of Genius: Biography and the Romantic Poet (review)

Julian North's book is a distinguished contribution to the emerging literary–critical genre of what might be called (by analogy with historiography) 'biographiography'–that is, the study of the development of biographical writing. The early nineteenth-century Lives of the Romantic poets, and of Byron in particular, play an important part in this story, and North's references to other notable recent contributions to this area include Richard Cronin's Romantic Victorians (2002) and Arthur Bradley and Alan Rawes's Romantic Biography (2003), as well as Tom Mole's Byron's Romantic Celebrity (2007) and Ghislaine McDayter's Byromania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture (2009), both of which were awarded the International Byron Society's Elma Dangerfield Prize in 2009.

Overall, North's book seeks to move away from the Romantics' own valorisation of autobiography and distrust of biography, and the subsequent critical resistance to these early Lives of the poets, and instead to 'remain open to the value of Victorian responses to Romantic culture', to 'question the caricature of nineteenth-century biography as a simplistically repressive and politically homogeneous discourse'.

In the 1820s and '30s, literary Lives became part of the daily fabric of reading, and it was during these years, when literary biography was asserting itself as a modern market force, that 'biography produced the "Romantic poet" for popular consumption'. As North points out, in the contest for readers between biography and poetry, biography has been decisively the winner: as Byron's publisher John Murray realised in the 1830s, so now, 'the only sure way to sell poetry is to return it to biography'.

As would be expected, gender issues form an important part of North's argument and she demonstrates how the development of biography in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, creating an intimate relationship between reader and subject, was crucially related to the middle-class ideological investment in domestic life. In the 1820s and '30s, North says, biographies 'enshrined a version of genius as masculine, autonomous and unreachable, but also countered it, asserting a feminine voice and the imperative of biography to mediate culture to as wide an audience as possible'; in other words, to domesticate and 'bring genius home to the reader'. Following, to some extent, Byron's own fictional self-presentations in works such as Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and the Oriental Tales, as well as the publication of 'Fare thee well!' and 'A Sketch from Private Life', which seemed to mark his Lordship's willingness to display his private self to public view, the question of Byron's masculinity and his (lack of) domestication became central to this process. North describes in some detail how, after his death and the destruction of his memoirs, 'readers were denied what may have been Byron's most intimate account of himself and the market was opened up for biographers to supply these revelations on his behalf '.

Some of Byron's biographers, such as Leigh Hunt, undermined the masculine and aristocratic image of the poet by showing Byron's domestic life as trivial and out of control. North's close reading of passages from Hunt's Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries (1828) is particularly effective in illustrating the way in which a biographer can use every textual nuance to establish his or her view of the subject. Thus she describes how, in Hunt's narrative,

there is always trouble behind the splendid facades of Byron's houses. The first one is at Monte Nero; 'the hottest-looking house I ever saw. Not content with having a red wash over it, the red was the most unseasonable of all reds, a salmon colour. Think of this, flaring over the country in a hot Italian sun!' The colour is not only vulgar and unsettlingly erotic, it is indicative of sexual impropriety and social mayhem going on inside. Hunt is taken into the interior to find the Countess Guiccioli, scarlet...