Crane's book is the kind of hybrid increasingly common in biographical circles today: part solid, inquisitive thoughtful history, part "f--gg--g his Imagination." Sixty pages of the book are pure invention, as Crane dramatizes the final meeting between Annabella and Augusta in the form of a play. It's not history, but the scene of these two old, broken women, facing for the last time the bitter truths about themselves and the man they shared, wouldn't make a bad movie; reading it I couldn't help but picture Maggie Smith and Helen Mirren doing the honors.

It's sometimes the case that the closer a biographer gets to the subject, the less there is to like. MacCarthy doesn't much like Byron; Crane waxes eloquent about Byron's "moral courage," whatever that means. Interestingly, both make some amusing leaps as to the literary influence of Byron and Annabella as public figures. MacCarthy sees traces of Byron in Heathcliff in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Rochester in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Crane, likewise, thinks the young Annabella was the model for the snooty Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's Middlemarch, and that her aged, embittered self inspired the character of Miss Havisham in Dickens' Great Expectations; Eliot's journals are full of notes on Byron's divorce, and Dickens knew Annabella personally.

Part of the lingering fascination with Byron isn't just that he's a paradox — vampire, genius, phony - but that for all that can be said against him, he apparently inspired loyalty and eternal forgiveness in those who knew him best. Take for example the abysmal way he treated his daughter Allegra, his daughter by Claire Clairmont. Byron met Claire after leaving England; she was one of Shelley's groupies and fell in love with Byron as soon as she saw him. Her subsequent pregnancy may well have been her hope of holding on to him forever, but Byron would not be held, and he couldn't stand children. He used to say he sympathized with King Herod, a joke that proved more true than he realized. By the time Allegra reached three, Byron had her dumped off at a drafty Italian convent, and - although he was only a few miles away — never saw her again. Eisler's book reproduces, in the child's own lovely longhand, a perfectly heartbreaking plea from Allegra for a visit from papa; maybe he could take her to the local fair, and buy her some sweets. Byron chalked this up to typical childish greediness, and so far as we know never even bothered to reply. Within six months, Allegra was dead. A grief-wracked Claire, who had split from Byron and had tried wresting Allegra from the convent, called him a murderer.

This thought was nowhere near her mind when she heard of Byron's own death in Greece two years later. She wrote: " ... the Reverend the Moral and fastidious may say what they please about Lord Byron's fame and damn it as they list — he has gained the path of eterni[t]y without them and lives above the blight of their mildewy censure to do him damage."