Byron in Geneva: That Summer of 1816 (review)

The summer of 1816 is somewhat legendary among Romanticists. The idea of Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley and Lord Byron visiting, travelling and sharing ideas against the backdrop of the picturesque Swiss mountains and unseasonably cold weather has captured the imagination of scholars and fans alike. Ken Russell’s 1986 film Gothic, like many other accounts of that infamous summer, focuses on the genesis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the competition among the friends as to who could compose the most frightening story. In Byron in Geneva: That Summer of 1816, however, David Ellis shifts the focus of the familiar collective narrative on to Byron alone. Of course, the Shelleys, Claire Clairmont, John Polidori and others play important roles, but they are supporting characters: Ellis’ book is Byron’s story.

Ellis begins with a preface that marks out the field of recent Byron biography, focusing on works such as Phyllis Grosskurth’s Byron: The Flawed Angel (1997), Benita Eisler’s Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame (1999) and Fiona MacCarthy’s Byron: Life and Legend (2002). Ellis acknowledges that certain aspects of Byron’s life and writings may lend themselves to scandalous or salacious interpretation, yet he contends that in these recent biographies Byron has been ‘receiving an unjustifiably bad press’. In an attempt to remedy the one-dimensional view of the famous lord as ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’, Ellis chooses to focus on this specific period in Byron’s life. He explains: ‘by taking a cross-section of his life, and examining his behaviour and relations with others in more detail than a full-scale biography allows, I hope to take a step towards a more sympathetic and therefore, in my view, more accurate portrait’. While ‘accuracy’ is, of course, somewhat subjective, Ellis’s work is certainly well-researched and achieves its goal of presenting a sympathetic and fully human portrait of Byron, while not apologising for or glossing over some of the less pleasant details surrounding the events of ‘that summer’, such as Byron’s separation from his wife and tumultuous relationship with Claire Clairmont. Indeed, the chapter that addresses Claire’s pregnancy is titled ‘The Problem of Claire and the First of the Visitors’, leaving readers in little doubt regarding Byron’s attitude towards the situation. The subsequent discussion of Byron’s relationship with their daughter Allegra presents him as an individual not particularly suited to parenthood. Of this relationship Ellis notes wryly that it ‘was quite true that the life Byron was living in Venice at this time provided a highly unsuitable environment for the rearing of an infant girl’.

In painting his sympathetic portrait of Byron, Ellis maintains his focus on interpersonal relationships. The significant events of that summer – interactions with literary celebrities, travels in the footsteps of Rousseau and the origins of a handful of Byron’s best-known works – are presented in terms of the relationships between Byron and the other key players, particularly the Shelleys, Claire and Polidori. However, Ellis also gives considerable attention to a number of secondary figures such as John Cam Hobhouse, Scrope Davies, Madame de Staël, Monk Lewis and various members of Byron’s household and staff. The treatment of these secondary characters is particularly accomplished, as Ellis works to present them through Byron’s eyes. For example, Byron’s valet William Fletcher appears on the fringes throughout the narrative, and Ellis uses him to illustrate Byron’s difficulty in parting with people who had become familiar to him, noting that, ‘Leporello to his employer’s Don Giovanni, Fletcher would follow Byron to Italy, and then to Greece, and be at his bedside when he died’. Similarly, details of Byron’s student life at Cambridge are interwoven with the account of Davies’s and Hobhouse’s visit to Geneva. In describing the travelling patterns of Hobhouse and Byron during their trip to the Jungfrau, Ellis notes how Hobhouse, who preferred walking, would set out several...