Here's a tip-off to a book about Byron--the dedication: "For my own women, Nancy and Rose, who would have shunned Byron" ["shunned" in italics]. Here's another: the use, without qualification, of such notoriously unreliable sources as Medwin and Trelawny, not to mention Lady Byron herself. Just when you think the evolution of Byron scholarship is such that it would be impossible for anyone to take Annabella's late, sanctimonious account of the marriage as unmitigated gospel, Larman comes along and does just that. An uncomfortably--and sometimes outrageously--one-sided, biased, and dilletantish effort is the inevitable result.

Credit where due: interesting, if not fresh or revelatory, on the women, and there's a brief but insightful discussion of the genesis of "Frankenstein" and Byron's influence and inspiration. Also, there's this fun quip: "The company that assembled for those June evenings at the Villa Diodati was an eclectic one. It comprised an adulterous atheist who had been disowned by his high-born family; his mistress, daughter of a woman whose already controversial reputation had been successfully ruined by her father's memoirs of her; her pregnant eighteen-year-old stepsister; a physician prone to bouts of depression; and Lord Byron, for light relief" (214).

"He was a man. Take him for all in all." He was so much more than "mad, bad and dangerous to know." But you wouldn't know it here. ( )