Byron’s letters reveal the real queer love and loss that inspired his poetry

By Sam Hirst, AHRC Funded Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in History, University of Nottingham

It’s July 5 1807. A drunk and tearful young man sits in his college rooms at Cambridge writing in a “chaos of hope and sorrow” to his childhood friend, Elizabeth Pigot. He has just parted with the one he calls his “Cornelian”, who he loves “more than any human being” – and he is pouring out his heart.

The young man is Lord Byron and his Cornelian is the Cambridge chorister John Edleston. He appears as “the Cornelian” in Byron’s prose writing, named for a gift he had given Byron. Gift…

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