‘Stand not on that brink!’: Byron, Gender and Romantic Suicide

Abstract

Byron’s splenetic wit looks right back to Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy as well as forward to the refusal of all orthodoxies that made André Breton and the Surrealists in the 20th century. Suicide became one of the main preoccupations of a coterie devoted to the revivification of the Gothic. Byron’s letters were saturated with references to suicide, comic and tragic. This essay is the first devoted entirely to Byron’s representations of suicide. Taking a historicist approach and one alert to gender the essay makes it clear that suicide was particularly relevant to the era when Byron was writing, when reform of the laws criminalising self-slaughter was being discussed in Parliament.