LETTER 5: October 31, 1811, Nicolas Giraud to Byron. All letters courtesy of The National Library of Scotland.

Lord Byron’s bisexuality is well known—but Byron’s archive still has the power to surprise us with new evidence about this part of his private life. Here are the first full English translations of eight letters written to Byron by his boyfriend Nicolas Giraud, with whom Byron had a not-so-secret relationship in Athens in 1810 through 1811. Giraud’s letters have not been published in full before, partly because they are difficult to decipher—they are written in misspelled and ungrammatical Italian, English, and an antiquated Greek script—and partly because they trouble Byron’s legend as a great lover of women.

As a teenager and young adult, Byron had several “unequal friendships,” as his associates dismissively called them, with other male youths. Written in the messy aftermath of the only such “friendship” that was unquestionably a sexual relationship, Giraud’s letters disclose the serious, romantic valences of Byron’s same-sex intimacies. They also reveal Byron’s private struggles during his years of fame. While performing the role of the straight heartthrob in public, Byron was concealing his more complex history—no matter the sacrifice to his feelings.

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Virginia Woolf to Lytton Strachey, March 26, 1930. Courtesy of the Virginia Woolf Papers, Smith College Mortimer Rare Book Collection, Smith College Special Collections.

Virginia Woolf was fascinated by biographical writing, even though she considered it something of a doomed genre. She wrote traditional and imagined biographies, of people and dogs, that experiment with how to recount a life. Her novels ask if, when, and how her characters’ innermost selves could be expressed externally. But she knew that sometimes we cannot access the details of our own lives. In one autobiographical essay, “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf lamented that her own memories produced a misleading account of her life because “the things one does not remember are … important; perhaps they are more important.” These things fell under the category of “non-being,” Woolf’s term for the parts of life not consciously lived. Woolf believed it was essential to capture the oblique, woolly moments that, inevitably, take up most of our lives, but by the time she was at her desk, writing “A Sketch of the Past,” she had already forgotten what she had discussed with her husband, Leonard, over lunch and tea. To recover some fragments of Woolf’s own non-being, we can look at what she barely remembered writing: her postcards. Scholars have paid little attention to these dashed-off missives. In fact, her editors intentionally left them out of the six-volume set of her collected letters, published between 1975 and 1980. As they explain in volume 5, nearly fifty postcards—which can be found in archives across the U.S. and the UK—were deemed unsuitable for publication because they “concern social arrangements or small business affairs which are often mentioned again in another context, and throw no new light on her character or life.” Read More