Volume 30, Number 9 · June 2, 1983
Byron and the 'Lively Life'
By John Bayley
Byron's Letters and Journals
edited by Leslie A. Marchand
Harvard University Press, 12 volumes, Vol. 12 'The Trouble of an Index', 166 pp., $15.00
Lord Byron: Selected Letters and Journals
edited by Leslie A. Marchand
Harvard University Press, 400 pp., $18.50
Byron
by Frederic Raphael
Thames and Hudson, 224 pp., $18.95
Byron: A Poet Before His Public
by Philip W. Martin
Cambridge University Press, 253 pp., $11.95 (paper)
In Aldous Huxley's first novel, Crome Yellow, an elderly man, Denis Stone, describes how in his hot youth he made hazardous preparations in Madrid to rescue from confinement in a convent a young lady he thought he adored. How very romantic, say the others, and how excited he must have been. Not at all, he answers: he felt nothing; he was too busy. He felt excited in prospect and pleased with himself afterward, but the actual business was a blank. And through the man's character the author comments on the significance of this for literature, which either keeps the reader in suspense or recounts in retrospect what it pretends is happening at the time.
Review, 6984 words
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