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

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 and Giver were immortalised in Byron’s first poetry collection, Hours of Idleness (1807), and Byron wore the Cornelian ring till the end of his life. This month marks 200 years since he died in 1824.

Researching LGBTQ+ history often means attempting to uncover and reconstruct evidence that has been excluded or erased, searching for queer traces that are frequently hidden, obscured or disguised.

The letter Byron wrote that night is a rare survivor, preserved, along with another written to Pigot’s mother after Edleston’s death, in the Newstead Abbey archive. They are fragments that gesture towards a larger story of teenage romance, loss and early-19th-century queer life.

To unearth queer history, researchers like myself must work with absences, deliberate erasures – lives...

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