Canto I was first published in 1819 and was considered so scandalous that Byron’s original publisher refused it. He had to find another. Like much of Byron’s work, Don Juan blurs the line between autobiography and fiction. But since the titular character was already an established literary figure, it’s harder to know where Byron ends and Juan begins.

“Truth is strange. Stranger than fiction,” Byron once wrote. Nowhere does that feel more apt than in Don Juan. Even so, there are unmistakable echoes of his life: the domineering mother, the absent father, the inherited fortune, and, of course, the ever-growing list of romantic scandals. Friends even suspected that Donna Inez was a thinly veiled Lady Byron, and many warned him the poem might be “too free for these very modest days.”

Yet Byron’s Don Juan is a far cry from the original Spanish libertine who debuted on stage in 1630. Byron flips the script. His Juan isn’t a brash seducer, but a wide-eyed wanderer, more often seduced than seducing. It’s usually the women who initiate the affairs, not the other way around. And rather than showing him in his older, more infamous years, Byron focuses on Don Juan’s youth. A choice that makes you wonder whether he meant this as a kind of origin story for the myth.

Critics were horrified, as were many of Byron’s friends, calling the poem crude, indecent, and unpublishable. Naturally, the public adored it. They devoured the satire, the scandal, and the audacity. After all, nothing attracts a crowd like the painful truth.

Art that mirrors reality too closely is often labelled as revolting. People don’t always want the truth — they want illusion. Thankfully, Don Juan survived its critics, and we’re left with one of the most brilliant, witty, and hilariously sharp portrayals of life in the Romantic era.