Keele Research Repository

It is arguable that Byron’s letters and journals have never really been on the fringes or margins of our responses to the poet. Those published, albeit in censored form, in Thomas Moore’s Letters and Journals of Lord Byron as early as 1830 made an immediate impression on the reading public.¹ Nevertheless, the two most important twentieth-century critics of Byron’s correspondence felt the need to make a case for seeing it as something greater than what Gérard Genette termed an ‘epitext’ – a marginal or supplementary discourse – to the literary works.² Leslie Marchand, in the general introduction to his priceless twelve-volume edition...