Chapter 1 - Byron’s Life and His Biographers

Summary

With his ironic distance and skepticism, Byron often appears to be our contemporary. But is he, or have we remade him in our image? Byron’s life poses this quintessential problem for biography, as the term ‘Byron’ has become the site of artistic and intellectual speculations, and of repeated moral and ethical struggles, as well as continued debate over what really happened. Byron himself believed in the truth of historical record, but he also revelled in the way the imagination shapes reality. His literary personae reify this dual commitment, from Childe Harold to Don Juan. Byron's own story is, like theirs, a tale of self-questioning and of self-forming, mirroring the way in which the art of biography itself has undergone questioning and reinvention. To read and absorb the many biographies of Byron is to trace the development of the contemporary biographical mode, with its meticulous research, its psychological sophistication, and its awareness that imagination as much as fact is required to begin to understand another human being. In this, as it so often seems to turn out, Byron got there before us.