Rewriting the Byronic Hero: “I'll try the firmness of a female hand”

Abstract

This article analyses a missing element of the history of that well-known figure, the Byronic Hero. The familiar story is that he – dark, brooding, and passionate – spread his bad-boy charm from the pages of Regency texts into the hearts of Regency audiences. He was usually paired with an idealized woman figure: the Gothic Villain had found love, and become a Romantic anti-hero. However, I contend that a detailed consideration of the hero figure in Byron's mid-career works demonstrates that one of the poet's own original Byronic Heroes is a woman, which makes the character type not exclusively male, marking the presence of a complex differentiation between the Byronic Hero, Byron's other heroes, and Byron's heroines. The same Byronic template can then be used to identify clearly the existence of women Byronic Heroes in the works of other writers, while still maintaining the effective specificity of the Byronic Hero category as a distinct subset of the Dark Hero figure.