The first person who uses the Byronic hero as a variant of the Romantic hero was Lord Byron (hence the name). In England, some authors focused on Lord Byron and a large number of Gothic novels and dramas contain a protagonist who is a Byronic hero.
As Gothic writers, Horace Walpole or Ann Radcliffe introduced in their novels the figure of the Gothic villan, which develops into the Byronic hero. As states in the web page http://www.umd.umich.edu/casl/hum/eng/classes/434/charweb/CHARACTE.htm, the characteristics of the Byronic hero would be:
- A rebel man.
- Possession of dark qualities instead of heroic virtues.
- Isolation from society.
- He is often moody by nature or passionate about a particular issue.
- Emotional and intellectual capacities superior from those of the average man.
- Characterized as arrogant, confident, abnormally sensitive, etc.
- Characterized by a guilty memory of some unnamed sexual crime.
For all of these characteristics the Byronic hero is considered a figure of repulsion but also fascination.
Examples of this byronic hero would be the ominous hero-villain of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and the brooding, guilt-haunted monk Schedoni of Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian(1797).
