The Castaway

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Hallie Erminie Rives’ The Castaway is a dark and dramatic fictional account of the life of the English poet, Lord Byron.

Rives follows Byron’s life from his sudden celebrity status to his self-exile from England and on through his death in 1824 as a hero of the Greek revolution.

But her depiction of Byron is a sanitized picture of the poet’s life. Byron’s sexual promiscuity destroyed his marriage and other relationships, but Rives attributes those failures to other factors.  She does acknowledge one illegitimate child, but almost as an afterthought. 

Throughout the book Rives injects snippets of Byron’s poetry, such as “She walks in Beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies.”  It’s a particularly effective method for providing context for his work.  And it will likely motivate you to spend some time with Byron outside this book.

Also, Rives is a word nerd’s delight.  Although much of her dialog is pure melodrama, her narrative utilizes a vocabulary that may have you scrambling occasionally for a dictionary.  It’s sophisticated and adds a richness you won’t find in most novels today.

If tormented souls produce the greatest poets, Byron may be the epitome of the great poet. The Castaway provides a fictional account of his torment that might generate a curiosity to learn more about the poet and his works.

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Quotes

What he did, he did frankly, with disdain for appearances.  Hypocrisy was to him the soul’s gangrene.  He preferred to have the world think him worse than to think him better than he was.

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