Clairmont
This novel ranges over 30 years and across Europe but again and again returns to a seminal year and place for the chief characters involved: Geneva in 1816. Here the poet Shelley, his wife Mary, and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, spent time, often with Lord Byron and other like-minded associates. This unconventional group of thinkers and writers was strongly influenced by Mary’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, her philosopher father, William Godwin, and the Romantic movement. They read, wrote and discussed their ideas with relentless commitment, and over rainy summer evenings in 1816 they entertained each other by telling ghost stories. From this emerged Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published two years later.
Living out their belief in Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman – her response to Tom Paine’s Rights of Man – created a world where the expectations of respectable society were shunned and free love embraced. These women will be ‘a new genus’, Wollstonecraft had declared. The challenge does not provide constant happiness for any of them. A recurring theme throughout the book is the acute and lifelong pain, for Shelley as well as the women at the loss of young children, not only through illness but also to custody arrangements resulting from their liaisons.
Lesley McDowell has centred her account of their lives round the least known and least appreciated person in the group: Claire Clairmont. For her there was no fame except by association with Byron and Shelley and her sister, the acclaimed author. She dutifully transcribes parts of Childe Harold for Byron but believes herself to be overlooked by all and appallingly treated by him in particular.
She was the last survivor of that extended literary group, and McDowell has successfully re-imagined the fascinating and complicated personal lives of a famous set of authors and their literary world.
