Lord Byron’s Jackal: A Life of Trelawny

‘A wonderful adventure story about a man who invented himself in the image of the Byronic hero and lived to the hilt the final passionate and violent flowering of Romanticism in the cause of Greek independence.’ STELLA TILLYARD

‘There is a mad chap come here – whose name is Trelawny… He comes on the friend of Shelley, great, glowing, and rich in romance… But tell me who is this odd fish? They talk of him here as a camelion who went mad on reading Lord Byron’s ‘Corsair’.’

In his brilliant first book, David Crane seeks to answer Joseph Severn’s famous question and investigates the life and phenomenon of Edward John Trelawny – writer, adventurer, romantic and friend to Shelley and Byron.

Trelawny’s is a story inextricably linked with Byron, and with the Greek War of Independence – a war which provided both Romantic Europe and Edward Trelawny with their most extravagant challenge.

There has been no general biography of Trelawny for nearly twenty years, no history of the philhellene role in the Greek war of Independence for even longer.

Reminiscent of Patrick French’s Younghusband, Lord Byron’s Jackal is not a life of Trelawny in the conventional sense. It is biography and travel writing of the highest calibre; it is an evocation of landscape and an exploration of the ways we can see and recover the past.

It is a sparkling debut for a talented new biographer.