The most recommended Lord Byron books

Everyone’s heard of Frankenstein, but a lot of people may not know that this legendary monster was created by a woman named Mary Shelley. In this fascinating picture book biography, Fulton doesn’t cover Mary Shelley’s entire life from beginning to end. Instead, she hones in on the most fascinating part—Lake Geneva, a stormy night, and a ghost-story challenge—that prompted Shelley to explore her imagination and write what has become one of the most famous monster stories of all time-- Frankenstein.

“Mad, bad and dangerous to know”, Lord Byron is such an enduring literary superstar that he hardly needs a recommendation, but today people talk about his many lovers, or his death in Greece where he went to fight against the Ottoman empire, much more than they read his work.

It may be that an idea of an old, long narrative poem sounds off-putting; Childe Harold is anything but. An early example of “autobiografiction”, this tale of a young and world-weary aristocrat on a long trip around European peripheries is based on Byron’s own experiences.

In terms of Harold’s jaded attitude, it could almost be a contemporary gap year trip, with a huge historic difference.

I love it for its early descriptions of the European East, and I encourage you to observe the attitude of superiority which would be emulated by so many Victorian and later authors, without Byron’s panache,… show more.

Thompson’s novel is another story about strong, intelligent, and powerful women who are manipulated and used by men. There have been numerous retellings of the birth of Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein. The fact that it occurred on a dark and stormy night is literary folklore. However, Thompson’s tale is the first time it has been told for a YA audience and he puts a wicked spin on the well-known origin story. This appealed to me as an English teacher. The characters—Mary, the poet Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and Lord Byron—are given a contemporary vibe. Mary is a lonely and moody teenager, swept off her feet by Shelley who is characterised as the 19th century’s version of a brooding and insatiable rock star, part Mick Jagger and part Nick Cave. 

“Many mixed martial artists claim they experience something like bliss at the moment they lose consciousness from a choke.” That’s a real quote from the book, which tells a personal journey of a 33-year-old man trying to to understand what it’s like to hit and get hit, and why some weirdos like me love it so much.

Count that as self-discovery if you’re fighter or an observational expedition if you can’t understand how someone can be one. Either way, keep that quote away from my wife, before she starts to rethink the decision to get our son into martial arts too.

Yeats is one of my favourite poets, and while you may not associate him with fantasy, he did write some extraordinarily beautiful poems that are retellings of Irish folk tales and legends. Teeming with faeries, immortals, and other fey creatures, these are poems in the tradition of the great Romantic poets such as Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson. The titular poem is only one of many beautiful fantasy poems in this collection.

Frayling’s book is very much a forerunner of Groom’s, being one of the first serious (but also immensely readable) studies of the vampire in culture. This one keeps its sights trained more on the nineteenth-century vampire. It begins with The Vampyre, the story written by John Polidori at the Villa Diodati at the same infamous gathering that spawned Marty Shelley’s Frankenstein. Polidori was Lord Byron’s physician, but the two men fell out badly, and Polidori’s aristocratic bloodsucker Lord Ruthven is widely regarded as modeled on Byron. Although now little remembered, The Vampyre began the Victorian craze for vampires that culminated in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Frayling is the perfect guide, being not only a cultural historian of wide learning but also a splendid communicator.

The giants of English biography (Janet Todd, Claire Tomalin, Lyndall Gordon) have written brilliant books about Wollstonecraft, but the one I went back to time and again (most dog-eared, underlined, annotated) was this dual biography of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley. An absolute page-turner, it reads like a novel, bringing this extraordinary mother and daughter to vivid life in alternating chapters that reveal parallels in who they were, what they believed, and how they lived.

This was the first biography of Ada. It is opinionated, comprehensive, and entertaining. Ada’s short, tumultuous life is related with little attention to mathematics or proto-computing, but much to her psychology and that of her family and friends. It’s a gothic tale of emotional hypocrisy and cruelty. Ada’s mother, Lady Byron, encouraged the aura of wickedness surrounding Lord Byron and styled herself its victim. Virulently self-righteous, she encouraged her daughter’s mathematical gifts in order to smother her imaginative ones. Despite Victorian piety, superstition, Old Boy network science, drug addiction, the confinement of women - and her overbearing Mother - Ada managed to engage the latest ideas in England and Germany and, working with Babbage, to produce an astonishingly prescient analysis of the “first computer.”

People will tell you Byron produced his best works in later life (not that late, though because he died at the age of 36), his literary prowess capping at Don Juan. That could be true, but there is something beautifully human about Hours of Idleness. It includes my absolute favourite poem, "Lachin y Gair". It’s the poem that rekindled my love of Byron’s poetry after several years of absence, drenched in the poet’s desperation to belong in that history. That same connection with the cultural past is what turned me to writing historical fiction.

But the book is more than just one poem. It’s a youth’s progression into a man, and (as you might expect from Byron) features all the sordidness and bitterness of the emergence of an adult soul.

As contemporary Gothic author and artist Franklin Bishop observe, John Polidori ‘was responsible for introducing into English fiction the enduring image of the vampyre in the guise of a suave, cynical, and murderous English Lord. With the presentation of Lord Ruthven [Byron] as a vampyre, Polidori created a personification of evil that countless authors have since imitated in attempting to satisfy the enormous public interest in this genre of literature. The literary-metamorphosed vampire that emerged from the Villa Diadoti ‘ghost story’ contest quickly developed a life force of its own – which was not surprising since it was the collective brainchild of Byron and his physician John Polidori – and created a minor literary scandal when it was published in 1818. The Vampyre was based on Lord Byron’s unfinished story "Fragment of a Novel," but it is arguably the most influential vampire work of the early 19th century.

I loved… show more.