8. An Awkward Family Relationship
Byron had seen little of his sister Augusta Leigh in their childhood. He made up for it in spades when he formed an extremely close relationship with her in adulthood. In 1814, Byron fathered a daughter upon his sister, which made for an awkward family relationship in which the poet was the unfortunate child’s uncle, as well as her father. It goes without saying that he was not faithful to his sister, and carried on a plethora of other affairs. Byron, ever sentimental, liked to keep mementos of his lovers. In those days, the norm was a lock of hair from one’s object of affection, perhaps tied with a ribbon. For Byron, Britain’s most flamboyant poet, eccentric aristocrat, and all-around pervert, a simple lock of hair would not do.
Instead, Byron liked to snip clumps of pubic hair from his lovers’ crotches, and kept them, cataloged and labeled, in envelopes kept in his publishing house. The cascade of scandals eventually made Britain too hot for Bryon. So he traveled around Europe for years at a stretch. He spent a seven-year stint in Italy, before his restlessness led him to join the Greeks in their war of independence from the Ottoman Turks. He was disappointed with the Greeks of his day, however, because they differed greatly from the heroic Hellenes he had read about in history books and Homer’s poems. While he moped about that discrepancy like only a romantic poet could, he caught a fever and died in a Greek backwater at the age of thirty-six.