My Recollections of Lord Byron: And Those of Eye-Witnesses of his Life

This two-volume work was originally published in French, and anonymously, in 1868. In 1869, Richard Bentley published an English translation by Hubert E. H. Jerningham, in which he stated that the work ‘is the production of the celebrated Countess Guiccioli’. Teresa Guiccioli (1800-73) was nineteen, and married to a much older man, when she first met Byron in Venice. Their subsequent love affair lasted until Byron left for Greece, together with her brother Pietro Gamba, whose account of Byron’s last days is also reissued in this series. Anxious to restore Byron’s reputation, which she believed to be tainted by a conflation in the public mind between the poet and his more notorious characters, she attempts to refute some of the more scandalous assertions about his life. Volume 2 continues to describe Byron’s qualities: his generosity, courage and modesty, but also his faults, including vanity and misanthropy.