Introduction

The Byronic hero is everywhere. From the autonomous assassin in recent instalments of the James Bond franchise to the stylish vampires that proliferate in popular fiction and on screen, this figure has captured the imagination of generations of readers and viewers.3 The first Byronic hero, and a blueprint for the rest, became an overnight sensation in March 1812, when Cantos I and II of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage were published and sold out within three days.4 Successive poems showcasing a spiritually isolated superman secured the literary fame and longevity of this Romantic poet and the legendary figure that bears his name. The Byronic hero remains, some 200 years after Byron became a bestselling poet, ‘an unprecedented cultural phenomenon’.5 His presence persists, for instance, in the immensely successful Twilight and Fifty Shades series, fantasy romances that reinscribe our fascination with a damaged and damaging anti-hero — a seductive outsider who is superior in suffering, sinfulness, subversions, and perversions — as encountered by an inexperienced, yet curious, young woman.6 That girlish innocence can triumph over manly experience through the redemptive power of love constitutes the staple ingredient in countless Regency romances and Mills and Boon novels. This gendered formula for fiction appears in the following ‘tip sheet’ for writing mass-market contemporary romance: ‘The hero is 8 to 12 years older than the heroine.