Byron

CATHERINE FRANKLIN is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Wales, Swansea. She is author of Byron's Heroines (1992), and editor of The Romantics: Women Poets, 1770-1830, 12 Vols. (1996) and The Wellesley Series: British Romantic Poets, 6 Vols. (1998).

'Caroline Franklin's Byron: A Literary Life is another welcome addition to its series, which also makes a strong independent contribution. This is a very fine book, superbly written, and constantly alive to the ways in which recent historicist criticism has recast Byron. Franklin's account loses nothing of the fascination of Byron's extraordinary life, neither does it deny, nor depress, the significance of his individuality. But she is also highly conscious of the ways in which Byron relates to the culture of his time, and the historical significance of his moment, a significance to which he also contributes. This is a book that speaks as powerfully to the novice as it does to the advanced scholar.' - Year's Work in English studies for 2000 'Franklin's lucid, incisive, and economical account offers both a fine introduction to the poet and a useful resource for scholars.' - Peter W. Graham, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University 'Franklin's book is rich in information about publishing in early nineteenth-century Britain, including everything from book-pricing to the rise of criticism in its modern sense.' 'This is a very fine book, superbly written, and constantly alive to the ways in which recent historicist criticism has recast Byron. Franklin's account loses nothing of the fascination of Byron's extraordinary life, neither does it deny, nor depress, the significance of his individuality. But she is also highly conscious of the ways in which Byron relates to the culture of his time, and the historical significance of his moment, a significance to which he also contributes. This is a book that speaks as powerfully to the novice as it does to the advanced scholar.' 'Byron, like the rest of us did not compose in a vacuum, misanthropic and independent as he liked to appear. As Carolyn Franklin's extremley useful book stresses, his friends, publishers and critics were vital to his sense of identity...Franklin is excellent in her third chapter, on the crisis in English drama at which Byron assisted when on the Management Committee of Drury Lane - theatre being an area on-one works in a social void...Franklin's analysis of the class-war significance of William Pary's book on Missolonghi is alone worth the price of the paperback.' - Peter Cochran, Cambridge, Romanticism

• Preface and Suggestions for Further Reading Chronology Prelude: Byron's Gothic Inheritance The Noble Poet and 'the Trade': Juvenilia and Juvenalia The Traveller from the East Meets the 'Emperor of the West': Byron and Murray The Acting Tragedy and the Tragedy of Acting: Byron, Drury Lane Theatre and Romantic Drama From Pilgrim to Patriot: Byron as Poet of Exile The Bookseller to the Admiralty and the Board of Longitude Beset by Pirates: Byron, Don Juan and the Freedom of the Press The Eagle, the Wren and the Snake: Byron and The Liberal Postscript Index