"Cultivate a persona deliberately, not accidentally Lord Byron's rock-star fame in the early 19th century was not accidental — historian Emily Brand points out that "it is a reputation that he very much cultivated himself," engineering the brooding, dangerous persona that drove Byromania. His deliberate self-mythologizing was so powerful that it spawned the modern archetype of the sexy, forbidden figure, traceable directly through literature to Edward Cullen and Christian Grey. The takeaway is that public reputation rarely forms on its own: those who shape their own narrative proactively tend to have that narrative outlast them, while those who leave it to chance are defined by others. Source: Emily Brand, History Hit, Georgian Vice: Gin, Opium & Snuff"