sections:
That Summer of 1816 focuses sharply on the summer Byron spent near the lake of Geneva in 1816, a famous time for meteorologists (for whom 1816 is the year without a summer), but also a crucial moment in a great poet’s life. Although designed to give a vivid impression of what Byron was really like at this period, there are carefully inserted passages of retrospection to remind readers of all the important phases in his previous existence and a final section to satisfy their curiosity as to `what happened next’. This cross-section approach to Byron’s life allows space for the proper investigation of a strong cast of supporting characters: Polidori, Shelley, Mary Godwin and Claire Clairmont, of course, but also Madame de Staël, who presided over a famous salon in Coppet, across the lake from Geneva; Matthew Lewis, author of the splendidly erotic `Gothic’ best-seller, The Monk (much admired by de Sade, as well as by Byron and Shelley); and two interesting intimates from Byron’s Cambridge days, John Hobhouse and Scrope Davies, through whom Byron’s remarkable gift for comedy can be displayed.
There is so much material on Byron that in the conventional biographies, where one damned thing has necessarily to follow another, there is no time to exhibit properly the different aspects of his nature brought out by different people, and to contrast these with what we can safely assume from his poetry were his internal soliloquies. Here there is space to both display and resolve major paradoxes of his personality: the combination in him, for example, of acute self-consciousness and exhibitionism, social conservatism and radical politics, or life-long depression and an apparently relaxed sociability. Byron has been out of favour recently, but the moment has perhaps come for a reassertion of his wit, irreverence, warm-heartedness and, above all in our somewhat ideology-ridden times, his hatred of cant.
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