Fatal attraction?

George Gordon Lord Byron may have been a great poet, but he was a very very very bad man. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning said, "let me count the ways." "Mad, bad and dangerous to know'' was Lady Caroline Lamb's pithy summary of her erstwhile lover. The highest of Gothic, his excesses are delineated in a most engrossing—albeit horrific—fashion in Byron in Love by another great writer, Edna O'Brien (who calls him "the first and ongoing celebrity" with "a mystery and a magnetism that defy time").
And if you have a few moments to spare for the good, bad & the ugly, peruse our extensive memoirs and biography section, now featuring the acclaimed Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books as well as three romps by the ever-captivating food writer Ruth Reichl.
Here's a question: How do you feel about engaging with the work of a writer or artist whose character you find reprehensible?