All Things Byron

Staying in Venice since March, singer songwriter Tess Callaghan has come to know some of the places still strongly associated with Byron to this day, along the Gran Canale, the swimming area in Lido, the Armenian monastery on the Island of San Lazzaro, a few of the houses he frequented. It therefore naturally struck Tess…

From catfights and arson to high society parties and attempted murder, this event offers an intimate insight into Byron’s Italian love life, told in his own words and introduced by Dr Emily Paterson Morgan. Sopranos Amanda Pitt and Helen Semple bring these romantic liaisons and affairs to life in songs, arias as a female response…

This blog post is based on a paper given at the 2021 International Byron Conference, which won the Byron Society Student Paper Award. The paper explores the first vampire Gothic novel, John William Polidori’s The Vampyre: A Tale (1819) as a form of a response regarding the image of Greece in Byron’s early works, and…

Claire Clairmont. Stepsister of Mary Shelley. Mistress of Lord Byron. The almost-famous member of the Byron/Shelley circle. I had always been mildly interested in her as a scholar but, also, so influenced by Byron’s offhand comment in a letter about Claire as “that odd-headed girl”; and Mary Shelley’s thinly-disguised annoyance with her stepsister’s constant presence…

Bernard Beatty is proof that one can read Byron for six decades without once being bored, as he says. For someone who has barely started on his lifelong journey with Byron, it is a special pleasure to hold the outcome of a lifetime of close and careful attention, Bernard’s new book Reading Byron, in my…

by Kaiwen Hou, 3rd June 2019. (Based on a paper given at the 2019 International Student Conference in Messolonghi,  for which Kaiwen received a Byron Society Grant). Lord Byron produced Cain when “a wave of blasphemy prosecutions [had] swept through England” (Schock: 86). As a controversial response to such a crisis, Byron dramatically revised the myth…

By Peter Gallagher, part of the Why isn’t Don Juan Read More series. Germaine Greer once observed[1] that Don Juan is the greatest comic poem in English. It should be as popular, she thought, as Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in Italy or, for that matter, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin in Russia. True, in my view! Still, if Don Juan enjoyed the popular renown of those…

by Natalie Speir “And again”, boomed Simon Russell Beale, as he deftly propelled the pianist and Lord Byron downstage to take another bow. This was October 2018, at Cadogan Hall; Byron Angel & Outcast was my fifth dramatised concert. The proceeds were directed to Dr Vincent Khoo’s research at the Royal Marsden into advanced prostate…