A TEI Transcription of Conversations with Lord Byron

Abstract

This project accompanies a TEI transcription of Lady Blessingtonâ s Conversations with Lord Byron, currently available on the Life and Times of Lord Byron online archive. Although often cited in biographies of Lord Byron, Lady Blessingtonâ s Conversations of Lord Byron has received little critical attention. Further, the genre of Blessingtonâ s work, the conversation as a biographical form, suffers the same dearth of critical material.

My aims, then, are to 1) present a brief history of the conversation as biographical form; 2) examine the publication history of the Conversations and underscore the social dimensions of its publication; and 3) evaluate Blessingtonâ s rhetorical strategies in the Conversations and to argue that Blessingtonâ s work is superior to two other accounts of Byron (by James Kennedy and Thomas Medwin) in terms of its psychological depth.