Good Lord, he was scandalous

Lord Byron still fascinates 200 years after his death, but more for his bohemian lifestyle than his poetry.

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Two hundred years ago, on April 19, 1824, Lord Byron died unexpectedly in Greece. Banished from British society for his shocking behaviour towards his wife, Byron had settled in Italy, but in 1823, sailed from Genoa to support the Greeks in their battles against the Ottoman Empire. Even in exile he was probably Britain's most famous writer, and certainly its most infamous. His poetry sold tens of thousands of copies in his lifetime and inspired generations of artists, from Pushkin and Tchaikovsky to Schumann and Delacroix. As Andrew Stauffer notes in his excellent new biography, moody fictional males from Emily Brontë's Heathcliff to Neil Gaiman's Dream owe a debt to Byron's haunted protagonists.

While Byronic presences are everywhere, how many readers can name, let alone recite, one of his poems? In 1813, Byron was offered the extraordinary sum of £1000 (about £57,000 or NZ$120,000, today) for his poem The Giaour. He turned down the payment, thinking it unseemly for a peer of the realm. Like many of his works, it became hugely popular. Today, few can even pronounce its title (hint: it rhymes with power).

Admiration for Byron's works may have faded, but fascination with his life remains. And no wonder: the man who was once called "mad, bad and dangerous to know" lived an extraordinary and deeply contradictory life. Stauffer's biography gives us that contradictory character in Byron's own words, drawing on his poetry but particularly his letters.

Byron was only 36 when he died; yet, because of his fame, more than 3000 of his letters survive. By comparison, we have about 250 of John Keats' letters, and a mere 160 from Jane Austen. The Byron biographer has rich material to work with; the challenge is in choosing the best.