Byron's Women

One was the mother who bore him; three were women who adored him; one was the sister he slept with; one was his abused and sodomized wife; one was his legitimate daughter; one was the fruit of his incest; and another was his friend Shelley's wife, who avoided his bed and invented science fiction instead. Nine women and one poet named George Gordon, Lord Byron--mad, bad, and very very dangerous to know. The most flamboyant of the Romantics, he wrote literary bestsellers, he was a satirist of genius, he embodied the Romantic love of liberty (the Greeks revere him as a national hero), he was the prototype of the modern celebrity--and he treated women (and these women in particular) abominably. Here, Alex Larman tells their extraordinary, moving, and often shocking stories. In so doing, he creates a scurrilous "anti-biography" of one of England's greatest poets, whose life he views--to deeply unflattering effect--through the prism of the nine damaged woman's lives.