The Leslie A. Marchand Memorial Lectures, 2000–2015: A Legacy in Byron Studies ed. by Katharine Kernberger (review)

Here are ten lectures from the series of annual lectures given in honour of Leslie Marchand. As Katharine Kernberger notes in her nicely conducted introduction: 'the range of disciplines represented here goes beyond the usual limits of literary scholarship' (p. xv) for there are articles by playwrights, publishers, medical authorities, as well as celebrated academics. Editing, too, must have been minimal in that the speaking, often anecdotal, character of the essays has been properly preserved. Most come with minimal endnotes. It does not read like the run of books on Byron published by a university press, but it is an extremely enjoyable and profitable read. Despite very varied approaches to Byron, the collection is unified simply by its attention to a single phenomenon – Byron's life and works – and by the warmth of the many grateful references to Leslie Marchand whose name, Peter Graham well says, 'invokes a blend of scholarly depth, range, and rigor, high-mindedness, industry, courtesy and kindness that cannot be copied' (p. 123). I only met him a few times in 1988, but that was my lasting impression too. It is fleshed out in three opening essays recalling Marchand especially written for the volume by Hermione de Almeida, the late and much missed Byron Raizis, and Marsha Manns. The latter gives much interesting information about Marchand's important role in the founding of the Byron Society in London in 1971 and the Byron Society of America two years later.

The lecture series was opened by Jerome McGann's 'Romantic Scholarship and Culture, 1960–2000: A Byronic View'. McGann discloses that it was Marchand who suggested that McGann should edit a new complete text of Byron's poems and thus completely change the Byron landscape. His essay, idiosyncratic, vigorous, and compelling, goes beyond its announced dates for it proposes a nineteenth-century model of literary attention rooted in philology and history which was overturned (disastrously in his view) by New Criticism and then literary theory. The latter coincided with McGann's turn to editing Byron which convinced him that the older emphases on philology, textual fact, and historical context were the right ones. A similarly idiosyncratic and compelling essay is Carl Woodring's 'Three Byronic Heroes: Leslie Marchand, Don Quixote, and Don Juan'. The essay jumps about brilliantly from anecdotes to surprising literary connections. Peter Graham's 'The Haunting of Don Juan' illuminates both the preciseness and the enigmatic quality of the two ghost appearances in Norman Abbey, for Byron's narrator 'asks us to take things on trust but also urges us to use our minds' (p. 135). These are the most obviously literary essays in the collection, though Alice Levine's 'Selecting Byron' charts (literally some of the time) the way that published 'Selections from Byron', including her own Norton Selection, share and differ in their choices. Particularly interesting here is what lyrics are taken to be Byron's best.

Malcolm Kelsall's 'The Delirium of the Brave: Byron and the United Irishman' begins by quoting Byron's self-identification with Edward Fitzgerald and then establishes a carefully staged and largely convincing thesis that Byron's concern with Irish politics is deeper and more pervasive than is normally assumed. John Clubbe's 'Beethoven, Byron, Napoleon and the Ideals of the French Revolution' argues that Napoleon embodied the Revolution and that Byron and Beethoven were enthusiastic about both. He acknowledges, of course, that they also had reservations (Hazlitt was horrified that Byron could be in two minds about Napoleon) but this essay has the force and merit of its simplicity. Romulus Linney, prolific novelist and playwright, wrote a play in 1977 (Childe Byron) about the relationship between Byron and Ada which was prompted by the author's own separation from his daughter because of divorce. His 'Byron in My Life' engagingly...