Byronic hero

The Byronic hero is "a variant of the Romantic hero as a type of character, named after the English Romantic poet Lord Byron." The type draws on Byron's own persona as much as on his characters, and it first won wide fame through the semi-autobiographical Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812 to 1818), whose gloomy hero readers identified with the poet himself. Lord Macaulay's description is the standard capsule: "a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart," a scorner of his own kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection.

The line runs from Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights and Rochester in Jane Eyre to the Phantom of the Opera, and the article's modern examples reach Batman, Jon Snow and Darth Vader. For novelists the type is the dark wing of the antihero: charisma bought with misery. The craft risk is an arc that never moves, pain used to excuse cruelty instead of costing the character something; keeping the line between brooding lead and villain visible is the job of antagonist and villain tracking.