The Private Life of Lord Byron

The Private Life of Lord Byron is a richly woven and intensely researched portrait of an unexamined side of the great literary figure.

Lord Byron starved himself compulsively for most, though not all, of his life. His behaviour mystified his friends and other witnesses. Yet he never imagined he was ill; doctors first recognised and named anorexia nervosa in 1873, almost fifty years after his early death.

Byron rationalized his behaviour as a fight for spiritual freedom and made it the cornerstone of his heroic ideal which was central to his fiction, to his life and, indeed, to his death. Inevitably it had a huge impact on both his life and his work.

This fresh biography aims to better understand the man; to explore these neglected or misunderstood aspects of his private life in order to illuminate his work, his idea of heroism, his relationships with women, with Napoleon, Coleridge and Shelley. This in turns points us towards a new understanding of his private intentions in his masterpiece, Don Juan.

Antony Peattie explores the patterns of behaviour that recurred throughout Byron’s life and sets these in contemporary context, culminating in Byron’s last days in Greece, where he tried to starve himself into heroic leadership but fatally damaged his constitution, resulting in his tragic death at the age of just thirty-six.