Byron's Women

One was the mother who bore him;three were women who adored him;one was the sister he slept with;one was his abused and sodomized wife;one was his legitimate daughter;one was the fruit of his incest;another was his friend Shelley's wife, who avoided his bed and invented science fiction instead.

Nine women;one poet named George Gordon, Lord Byron – mad, bad and very very dangerous to know. The most flamboyant of the Romantics, he wrote literary bestsellers, he was a satirist of genius, he embodied the Romantic love of liberty (the Greeks revere him as a national hero), he was the prototype of the modern celebrity – and he treated women (and these women in particular) abominably. In BYRON'S WOMEN, Alex Larman tells their extraordinary, moving and often shocking stories. In so doing, he creates a scurrilous 'anti-biography' of one of England's greatest poets, whose life he views – to deeply unflattering effect – through the prism of the nine damaged woman's lives.