Byronic Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing and Screen Adaptation by Sarah Wootton (review)

With the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage over two hundred years ago, Byron's first creation of his stern, melancholy, and brooding hero captured the reading public's attention and made him famous overnight. Other comparable protagonists were soon to follow. Ranging from Manfred and Lara, to Conrad, Cain, Don Juan, and the Giaour, Byron's alter-egos—whose character traits were believed to express a licentious dismissal of orthodox views and lifestyles—represent 'not only the archetypal anti-hero' but also the ultimate 'epitome of a modern myth—instantly recognisable, endlessly reinterpreted, and enduringly elusive'. Recent studies on Byron by Clara Tuite, Peter Cochran, and Edna O'Brien have focused on his scandalous life of excess and debauchery in ways that conflate the man, the poet, and the legend while often undermining the philosophical, historical, and intellectual qualities of his works. Sarah Wootton's study, however, departs from recent treatments insofar as her main contention is that the female authors she considered 'are engaged in a "double" discourse about Byron that discerns creative value in the poetry and castigates the public profile'. Thus, the popularity of this unparalleled cultural phenomenon as well as the reinterpretation of the hero in Victorian texts marks a success in the poet's critical reception and afterlife and makes readers consider the links between Romanticism, the Victorian age and popular culture.

Wootton has produced a graceful, detailed, and commendable account of the Byronic hero and its relevance to nineteenth-century women's writing and subsequent screen adaptations of their work. She places particular emphasis on 'exploring the tensions' between the Romantic age and later literary examples, rather than 'detecting parallels'. More specifically, Wootton investigates recreations of the Byronic hero in works by Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. She focuses on why Byronic presences feature so prominently in their writing, what is distinctive about their respective treatments of this figure, and how the Byronic hero is subsequently reinvented. The effect of such reinvention in modern screen adaptations is explored, ranging from works such as the BBC's successful 1995 series of Pride and Prejudice (dir. Andrew Davies) and Emma Thompson's Sense and Sensibility (dir. Ang Lee, 1995), to other BBC adaptations such as Anthony Page's Middlemarch (1994), Nicholas Renton's Wives and Daughters (both screenplays by Andrew Davies, 1999) and Brian Percival's North and South (screenplay by Sandy Welch, 2004), and the more recent ITV Northanger Abbey (dir. Jon Jones, screenplay Andrew Davies, 2007). Wootton concentrates on three complementary forms of dialogues between Romanticism and the Victorian era: dialogues about gender roles, dialogues about masculinity, and dialogues about genre.

Although the claim that nineteenth-century literary culture was influenced in various ways by Romanticism has long been established, Wootton rightly points out that the nineteenth-century female authors she selects 'have not received the sustained scholarly attention they deserve […] specifically in terms of screen adaptations, which have yet to be explored'. Each of these female authors is the focus for two of the book's five chapters, with a little less space given to Gaskell to whom Wootton dedicates one chapter only, making the structure of this monograph a little unbalanced. As far as Romanticism is concerned, Wootton's study is not only about Byron and Austen. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Burns, Hemans, Barbauld, Southey, Scott, Percy and Mary Shelley, and European writers such as Novalis are all invoked throughout and are read alongside the nineteenth-century novels she has selected. This book ultimately is as much about Romanticism, or the legacy of Romanticism, as it is about Victorian literature and will thus appeal to readers interested in the literature of both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In Chapter One, Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility are paired under the rubric of changing models of masculinity in the early nineteenth century, such...