Byron was published by Grasset in 1930, seven years after Ariel had established Maurois as the foremost literary biographer in Europe. The choice of subject was natural: Byron and Shelley had been friends, rivals, and co-creators of the Romantic myth, and their story is inseparable. But where Shelley was an idealist destroyed by the world’s indifference, Byron was something more complex — a cynic who was also a sentimentalist, an aristocrat who was also a revolutionary, a man who cultivated his own legend while despising the public that consumed it.
Maurois’s Byron is organized around the central paradox of the poet’s character: the gap between the public persona (the Byronic hero — dark, passionate, haunted by unspecified sins) and the private man (witty, generous, practical, and intermittently kind). The biography traces Byron from his unhappy childhood (the club foot, the absent father, the domineering mother, the title inherited at ten) through the years of fame in London (1812–1816, when Childe Harold made him the most famous man in England), the scandal of his separation from Lady Byron (which drove him into permanent exile), and the final years in Italy and Greece, where he died at thirty-six fighting for Greek independence.
Maurois is particularly insightful on the women in Byron’s life — Lady Caroline Lamb, Annabella Milbanke, Augusta Leigh (his half-sister, with whom he almost certainly had an incestuous relationship), and Teresa Guiccioli, the Italian countess who was his last great love. He treats the Augusta relationship with remarkable frankness for 1930, arguing that it was the central emotional event of Byron’s life and the key to his poetry: the sense of guilt, the flight from England, the compulsive self-destruction all stem from this “unforgivable” love.
The critical assessment of Byron’s poetry is mixed. Maurois prefers Don Juan — the great comic masterpiece of English Romanticism — to the earlier, more famous works, and he makes a strong case that Byron’s real genius was satirical rather than lyrical. This judgment has been endorsed by subsequent criticism: Don Juan is now generally considered Byron’s masterpiece, and the brooding Byronic lyrics that made his contemporary reputation are valued more as cultural documents than as great poetry.
The English translation was published by D. Appleton (1930) and was a major success on both sides of the Atlantic. It remains one of the most readable short biographies of Byron, superseded in scholarship by Leslie Marchand’s three-volume life (1957) and Fiona MacCarthy’s Byron: Life and Legend (2002), but unsurpassed in narrative economy and psychological acuity.
Collecting Byron
First French edition (Grasset, Paris, 1930): Two volumes, original wrappers.
First English edition (D. Appleton, New York, 1930): Translated by Hamish Miles. Blue cloth.
Market values:
- French first, two volumes, fine: $40–$100
- English first in dust jacket: $30–$80
- Later editions: $5–$15