Byron in love

Biographer Edna O'Brien has written an intimate biography that suits her fiery and charismatic subject. She follows Byron from the dissipations of Regency London to the wilds of Albania and the Socratic pleasures of Greece and Turkey, culminating in his meteoric rise to fame at the age of 24 on the publication of Childe Harold. With her prismatic eye and novelistic style, O'Brien captures the spirit of the man and creates a portrait of Byron that explodes the Romantic myth. From his escapades with a fourteen-year-old Cambridge choir boy, to those with a galaxy of women that included his half-sister, his wife of one year, and the Italian countess who forsook her husband for "the peer of England," Byron scandalized the world and inspires "Byronmania" to this day--the poet as rebel, imaginative and lawless, and defiantly immortal.--From publisher description.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.