George Gordon Byron, the 6th Baron Byron, known simply as Lord Byron, was an English poet and leader of the Romantic movement.
Byron is regarded as one of the greatest English poets, one who was immensely popular during his time and remains influential today. Among his best-known works are the long narrative poems Don Juan (1819) and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812). His sonnet She Walks in Beauty (1814) is also quoted frequently to this day.
His love life scandalized society at the time. He had a very public affair with Lady Caroline Lamb, after which she followed him and even tried sneaking into his house dressed as a page boy. In 1816, she went on to publish Glenarvon (1816), a wildly popular (and unflattering) novel about Byron and society.
Eventually, Byron courted and married Caroline Lamb's cousin, Anne Isabella Milbanke, in 1815. They had one daughter, Augusta Ada (Ada Lovelace), in 1816, but the marriage was unhappy and soon ended with Byron signing a Deed of Separation.
After the dissolution of his marriage, Byron went to continental Europe where he spent the rest of his life. It was there that Byron befriended the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and Shelley's future wife, Mary Godwin. He was also joined by Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, with whom he’d had an affair in London. It was when they were all together that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818).
Byron is considered to be the first modern-style celebrity. His image as the personification of the Byronic hero fascinated the public, and his wife Annabella coined the term "Byromania" to refer to the commotion surrounding him.[1] His self-awareness and personal promotion are seen as precursors to what would become the modern rock star persona.
Byron's bisexuality was not widely known during his life, and thanks to his memoir being destroyed in a fire at the offices of his publisher, along with the suppression of details of his sexual life by subsequent heads of the firm (which held the richest Byron archive), it went unknown for long after his death. It took years for biographers, poring through the details of Byron's life, to find abundant evidence of his relationships with men and women. Many struggled to describe his sexuality, saying things like,
Byron's sexual orientation has long been a difficult, not to say contentious, topic, and anyone who seeks to discuss it must to some degree speculate, since the evidence is nebulous, contradictory and scanty ... it is not so simple to define Byron as homosexual or heterosexual: he seems rather to have been both, and either.[2]
Happily, we have a much easier way of saying this. Lord Byron was bi.