The Missolonghi Manuscript
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Edition: First ed.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
What if Lord Byron, on the eve of his death in the fever-ridden Greek town of Missolonghi, committed his most intimate confessions to paper? The Missolonghi Manuscript presents exactly this audacious premise, casting Frederic Prokosch's fictitious Byron as narrator of his own turbulent life — a life of scandalous loves, poetic genius, aristocratic excess, and revolutionary idealism. Set against the sweeping backdrops of Regency England, the drawing rooms of Europe, and the battlefields of Greece, the novel chronicles Byron's passionate entanglements, his stormy friendships with Shelley and Keats, and his final, fatal crusade for Greek independence, all rendered in a voice of intoxicating elegance and melancholy grandeur. Prokosch, himself a celebrated stylist, constructs a portrait of the Romantic age that is as much an act of literary ventriloquism as it is a meditation on art, mortality, and the myth of the poet-hero. The novel inhabits the blurred boundary between biography and invention, inviting the reader to question where historical fact ends and imaginative truth begins. Rich with period detail and psychological acuity, it stands as a singular achievement in 20th-century historical fiction — a work that captures the incandescent, self-destructive spirit of Byron so vividly that one cannot help but wonder: how much of this confession did he actually mean to keep secret?
Author: Frederic Prokosch
Format: Hardback
Published: 1968, W. H. Allen
Genre: Historical fiction
Edition: First ed.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
What if Lord Byron, on the eve of his death in the fever-ridden Greek town of Missolonghi, committed his most intimate confessions to paper? The Missolonghi Manuscript presents exactly this audacious premise, casting Frederic Prokosch's fictitious Byron as narrator of his own turbulent life — a life of scandalous loves, poetic genius, aristocratic excess, and revolutionary idealism. Set against the sweeping backdrops of Regency England, the drawing rooms of Europe, and the battlefields of Greece, the novel chronicles Byron's passionate entanglements, his stormy friendships with Shelley and Keats, and his final, fatal crusade for Greek independence, all rendered in a voice of intoxicating elegance and melancholy grandeur. Prokosch, himself a celebrated stylist, constructs a portrait of the Romantic age that is as much an act of literary ventriloquism as it is a meditation on art, mortality, and the myth of the poet-hero. The novel inhabits the blurred boundary between biography and invention, inviting the reader to question where historical fact ends and imaginative truth begins. Rich with period detail and psychological acuity, it stands as a singular achievement in 20th-century historical fiction — a work that captures the incandescent, self-destructive spirit of Byron so vividly that one cannot help but wonder: how much of this confession did he actually mean to keep secret?