This project accompanies a TEI transcription of Lady Blessington'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 Blessington's Conversations of Lord Byron has received little critical attention. Further, the genre of Blessington'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 Blessington's rhetorical strategies in the Conversations and to argue that Blessington's work is superior to two other accounts of Byron (by James Kennedy and Thomas Medwin) in terms of its psychological depth.