Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life. Edna O'Brien. Norton. 240 pages. $24.95.

The wife of a future prime minister sent him a bloody tuft of her pubic hair. Such expressions of devotion were not uncommon for Lord Byron. Edna O'Brien believes that the reason for his sexual success lay in a profane trinity: ''He was Poet, Devil and God, attributes that appealed to every woman.'' The infernal side of his personality interests O'Brien most, which makes for an energetic, enthralling biography in which concision and readability are a welcome change from the appetite for minutiae that has become a staple of the genre.

An acclaimed novelist and short story writer, O'Brien is equally adept at narrating the life of a real person. But half your job is already done for you when your subject is a relentless self-mythologizer who seemed destined from birth to be, as one of his lovers said, ``mad, bad, and dangerous to know.''

Aside from a clubfoot, Byron was blessed by the gods: a handsome, brilliant aristocrat whose books flew off the shelves, he was the toast of high society in Regency England. But the party came to a crashing halt after the greatly indebted poet married a prudish heiress. The poor girl had no idea that she'd stepped into a Gothic thriller: ''Their wedding night had its literary correlation in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, a crimson curtain catching fire, a hallucinating bridegroom believing he was in hell, then pacing the long ghostly gallery with his loaded pistols.'' Matters weren't helped by the fact that he was cheating on her with his half-sister. After he brutally sodomized her, she finally left him and exposed all the sordid details. Byron was branded a pariah.

Unbowed and unrepentant, he went into permanent exile. On the European mainland he let his freak flag fly. Polymorphously perverse, he slept with several men and hundreds of women. But he also toiled on his masterpiece, Don Juan, an epic satire that Keats and Wordsworth denounced for its amorality.

Literature was never manly enough for him, however, so he jumped at the chance to help the Greeks win their independence from the Ottoman empire. His dream was to be struck down in battle, but after falling ill in Messolonghi he was tended to by doctors who bled him to death with overeager lancets and a faceful of leeches.

While all this is well-trodden ground, O'Brien retraces it with a novelist's understanding of tempo and characterization. Abrupt tense shifts and occasional repetitions are only mildly disconcerting. However, do not expect to learn much about Byron's poetry: as is often the case, it's overshadowed by the man and the legend.

Ariel Gonzalez teaches English at Miami Dade College.

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