11. Byron and His Unexpected Relationship With His Sister
Lord Byron, or George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (1788 – 1824), was a key Romantic Movement figure. A poet, satirist, politician and peer, his poems and personality captured Europe’s imagination. Among his best known poetic works are the short love poem She Walks in Beauty, the gloomy Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and the satiric Don Juan. Byron is widely regarded as one of Britain’s best poets, known and acclaimed for his brilliant use of the English language. However, he gained further fame – or infamy – and became even better known for his flamboyance and amorous lifestyle. Byron gained even more infamous because of the notoriety of his sexual escapades with both men and women. His most infamous sexual escapade was a years-long weird incestuous relationship with his sister. Lord Byron’s most problematic affair was an incestuous one with his own sister, Augusta Leigh, of whom Byron had seen little in childhood.
Byron made up for it – and how – as an adult, when he formed an extremely close relationship with her. In 1814, the poet fathered a daughter upon his sister, which made Byron the child’s uncle, as well as father. As befits a key figure of the Romantic Movement, Lord Byron was a sentimentalist. As such, he liked to keep mementos of his lovers. In those days, the norm for mementos was a lock of hair from one’s object of affection, perhaps tied with a ribbon. But he was Byron, Britain’s most flamboyant poet, eccentric aristocrat, and all around pervert. A simple lock of hair would not do for him. Instead, Byron liked to snip clumps of pubic hair from his lovers’ crotches, and kept them, catalogued and labeled, in envelopes.
