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Clara Mary Jane Clairmont (27 April 1798 – 19 March 1879), commonly known as Claire Clairmont, was the stepsister of English writer Mary Shelley and the mother of Lord Byron's daughter Allegra Byron. She is thought to be the subject of a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
In December 1801, when Clairmont was three years old, her mother married a neighbour, the writer and philosopher William Godwin. This brought her two stepsisters: Godwin's daughter, later Mary Shelley, only eight months her senior, and his stepdaughter Fanny Imlay, a couple of years older. Both were the daughters of Mary Wollstonecraft, who had died four years before, but whose presence continued to be felt in the household. The new couple soon became the parents of a son, which completed the family.
All five children were influenced by Godwin's radical anarchist philosophical beliefs. Both parents were well-educated and they co-wrote children's primers on Biblical and classical history, and ran a bookshop and publishers known as the Juvenile Library. Godwin encouraged all of his children to read widely and give lectures from early childhood.
Mary Jane Clairmont was a sharp-tongued woman, who often quarrelled with Godwin and favoured her own children over her husband's. She contrived to send her volatile and emotionally intense daughter to boarding school for a time, so providing her with more formal education than her stepsisters. Unlike Mary, Claire Clairmont was fluent in French as a teenager and was later credited with fluency in five languages. Despite their different treatment, the girls grew close and remained in contact for the rest of their lives.
Clairmont remained in the Shelley household in their wanderings across Europe. The three young people traipsed across war-torn France and into Switzerland, fancying themselves as characters in a romantic novel, as Mary Shelley later recalled, but always reading widely, writing, and discussing the creative process. On the journey, Clairmont read Rousseau, Shakespeare and the works of Mary's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. "What shall poor Cordelia do – Love & be silent", Clairmont wrote in her journal while reading King Lear. "Oh this is true – Real Love will never shew itself to the eye of broad day – it courts the secret glades." Clairmont's emotions were so stirred by Cordelia that she had one of her "horrors", a hysterical fit, Mary Shelley recorded in her own journal entry for the same day. Clairmont, who was surrounded by poets and writers, also made her own literary attempts. During the summer of 1814, she started a story titled The Idiot, which has since been lost. In 1817–1818, she wrote a book, which Percy Bysshe Shelley tried without success to have published.Booth, pp. 67–70. Although Clairmont lacked the literary talent of her stepsister and brother-in-law, she always longed to take centre stage. It was during this period that she changed her name from "Jane", first to "Clara" and finally to the more romantic-sounding "Claire".
She convinced Mary and Percy Shelley that they should follow Byron to Switzerland, where they met him and his personal physician, John William Polidori, at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva. It is unknown whether Clairmont knew she was pregnant with Byron's child at the commencement of the trip, but it soon became apparent to both her travelling companions and to Byron not long after their arrival at his door. At first he maintained his refusal of Clairmont's companionship and allowed her to be in his presence only in the company of the Shelleys; later, they resumed their sexual relationship for a time in Switzerland. Clairmont and Mary also made fair copies of Byron's current work-in-progress, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.Eisler, p. 519.
Clairmont was the only lover, other than Caroline Lamb, whom Byron referred to as a "little fiend".Eisler, p. 515. Confessing the affair in a letter to his half-sister Augusta Leigh, Byron wrote:
He referred to her also in a letter to Douglas Kinnaird (20 January 1817):
Clairmont would later say that her relationship with Byron had given her only a few minutes of pleasure, but a lifetime of trouble.
Upon arriving in Italy, Clairmont was again refused by Byron. He arranged to have Allegra delivered to his house in Venice and agreed to raise the child on the condition that Clairmont keep her distance from him. Clairmont reluctantly gave Allegra over to Byron.
Clairmont was granted only a few brief visits with her daughter after surrendering her to Byron. When Byron arranged to place her in a Capuchin convent in Bagnacavallo, Italy, Clairmont was outraged. In 1821, she wrote Byron a letter accusing him of breaking his promise that their daughter would never be apart from one of her parents. She felt that the physical conditions in convents were unhealthy and the education provided was poor and was responsible for "the state of ignorance & profligacy of Italian women, all pupils of Convents. They are bad wives & most unnatural mothers, licentious & ignorant they are the dishonour & unhappiness of society.... This step will procure to you an innumerable addition of enemies & of blame."Eisler, pp. 690–691.
By March 1822, it had been two years since she had seen her daughter. She plotted to kidnap Allegra from the convent and asked Shelley to forge a letter of permission from Byron. Shelley refused her request. Byron's seemingly callous treatment of the child was further vilified when Allegra Byron died there at the age of five, from a fever some scholars identify as typhus and others speculate was a malaria. Clairmont held Byron entirely responsible for the loss of their daughter and hated him for the rest of her life. Shelley's death followed only two months later.
Mary Shelley's early journals record several times when Clairmont and Shelley shared visions of Gothic fiction and let their imaginings take flight, stirring each other's emotions to the point of hysteria and nightmares.Fisch, Mellor, and Schor, p. 45. In October 1814, Shelley deliberately frightened Clairmont by assuming a particularly sinister and horrifying facial expression. "How horribly you look... Take your eyes off!" she cried. She was put to bed after yet another of her "horrors". Shelley described her expression to Mary as "distorted most unnaturally by horrible dismay". In the autumn of 1814, Clairmont and Shelley also discussed forming "an association of philosophical people" and Clairmont's conception of an idealized community in which women were the ones in charge.
Shelley's poem "To Constantia, Singing" is thought to be about her:
Mary Shelley revised this poem, completely altering the first two stanzas, when she included it in a posthumous collection of Shelley's works published in 1824. In Shelley's "Epipsychidion", some scholars believe that he is addressing Clairmont as his:Eisler, p. 519.
At the time Shelley wrote the poem, in Pisa, Clairmont was living in Florence, and the lines may reveal how much he missed her.Gittings and Manton, p. 58.
It has occasionally been suggested that Clairmont was also the mother of a daughter fathered by Percy Shelley. The possibility goes back to the accusation by Shelley's servants, Elise and Paolo Foggi, that Clairmont gave birth to Shelley's baby during a stay in Naples, where on 27 February 1819, Shelley registered a baby named Elena Adelaide Shelley as having been born on 27 December 1818. The registrar recorded her as the daughter of Percy Shelley and "Maria" or "Marina Padurin" (possibly an Italian mispronunciation of "Mary Godwin"), and she was baptized the same day as the lawfully begotten child of Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin. It is, however, almost impossible that Mary Shelley was the mother, and this has given rise to several theories, including that the child was indeed Clairmont's.Seymour, p. 221; Holmes, pp. 460–474; Bieri, pp. 103–112; Gittings and Manton, p. 46; Journals of Mary Shelley, pp. 249–250 n3. Among several theories, some scholars have speculated she was Elise Foggi, a nursemaid of the Shelley family; others believe Elena's mother was Clairmont. Thomas Medwin, a cousin of Shelley, claimed the mother was an unnamed woman with whom Shelley had an affair. It has also been proposed that Shelley adopted a local child as his own, or that the child was Elise Foggi's by Byron. Clairmont herself had ascended Mount Vesuvius, carried on a palanquin, on 16 December 1818, only nine days before the date given for the birth of Elena.Seymour, p. 224. Though, since the question arises of why Shelley waited two months before registering the baby, the birth date may not be reliable. It may be significant, however, that Clairmont was taken ill at about the same time – according to Mary Shelley's journal she was ill on 27 December – and that her journal of June 1818 to early March 1819 has been lost.Gittings and Manton, p. 45; Bieri, p. 104. Bieri calls the loss of the journal "significant and probably not accidental" and part of a situation in which "the Shelley family was concealing much that occurred in Naples". In a letter to Isabella Hoppner of 10 August 1821, Mary Shelley, however, stated emphatically that "Claire had no child". She also insisted:
The infant Elena was placed with foster parents and later died on 10 June 1820. Byron believed the rumours about Elena and used them as one more reason not to let Clairmont influence Allegra.Eisler, p. 668.
Two Russian men she met commented on her general disdain for the male sex; irritated by their assumption that since she was always falling in love, she would return their affections if they flirted with her, Clairmont joked in a letter to Mary Shelley that perhaps she should fall in love with both of them at once and prove them wrong.
Clairmont also clung to memorabilia of Percy Shelley. The Aspern Papers by Henry James is inspired by the true story of a retired captain, Edward Silsbee, who tried to purchase the letters that Shelley had written to Clairmont, and which she saved until her death. Clairmont died in Florence on 19 March 1879, at the age of 80 having outlived all the members of Shelley's circle except Trelawny and Jane Williams.
Thirty years later, Clairmont was played by Bel Powley in Mary Shelley (2017) and by Nadia Parkes in the Doctor Who episode "The Haunting of Villa Diodati" (2020),
She is also referred to in a disparaging manner by Jonathan Strange in the novel "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell" while he is describing his relationship with Lord Byron in letters home.
Later life
Shortly after Clairmont had introduced Shelley to Byron, she met Edward John Trelawny, who was to play a major role in the short remaining lives of both poets. After Shelley's death, Trelawny sent her love letters from Florence pleading with her to marry him, but she was not interested.Eisler, p. 724. Still, she remained in contact with him the rest of her long life.Gittings and Manton, p. 71. Clairmont wrote to Mary Shelley: "He Trelawny likes a turbid and troubled life; I a quiet one; he is full of fine feeling and has no principles; I am full of fine principles but never had a feeling (in my life)."
Governess in Russia
Devastated after Shelley's death, Mary returned to England. She paid for Clairmont to travel to her brother's home in Vienna where she stayed for a year, before relocating to Russia, where she worked as a governess from 1825 to 1828, firstly in St Petersburg and then in Moscow. During her time in Russia, she witnessed the Decembrist revolt. The people she worked for treated her almost as a member of the family. Still, what Clairmont longed for most of all was privacy and peace and quiet, as she complained in letters to Mary Shelley.
Dresden
She returned to England in 1828, but remained there only a short while before departing for Dresden, where she was employed as a companion and housekeeper. Scholar Bradford A. Booth suggested in 1938 that Clairmont, driven by a need for money, might have been the true author of most of The Pole, an 1830 short story that appeared in the magazine The Court Assembly and Belle Assemblée as by "The Author of Frankenstein". Unlike Mary Shelley, Clairmont was familiar with the Polish used in the story. At one point, she thought of writing a book about the dangers that might result from "erroneous opinions" about the relations between men and women, using examples from the lives of Shelley and Byron. She did not make many literary attempts, as she explained to her friend Jane Williams:
Return to England
In 1836, the year William Godwin died, Clairmont returned to England, where she worked as a music teacher. She cared for her mother when she was dying. In 1841, after Mary Jane Godwin's death, Clairmont moved to Pisa, where she lived with Margaret King (officially Lady Margaret Mount Cashell but known as Mrs Mason), an old pupil of Mary Wollstonecraft. She lived in Paris for a time in the 1840s, where she attended Harriet de Boinville's social gatherings, crowded with republicans and Italian revolutionaries. In one letter to her stepsister, Mary, she wrote:"At Madame de Boinville's the people are clever and I go there and I like the conversation, but I am never allowed to speak myself... after fifteen years being silent, I want to talk a good deal... to clear out my mind of all the ideas that have been accumulating and literally rotting there for so many years – but they won't allow me this in Rue Clichy – the instant I speak, the whole coterie fall upon my words and pick them to pieces... seize upon my argument (so dear to me)... they are liberals of such opposite characters... I beg it to be understood that I am the most liberal, I am proud to say, not one of them can keep pace with me in liberality – I leave them all five hundred miles behind me."Clairmont, Claire. Letters to Mary Shelley. July 12, 1842, November 22, 1832; June 2, 1843; March 18, 1844; December 9 and 23, 1844; The Clairmont Correspondence: Letters of Claire Clairmont, Charles Clairmont, and Fanny Imlay Godwin. Volume 2: 1835-1879. Edited by Marion Kingston Stocking. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
Percy Shelley had left her £12,000 in his will, which she finally received in 1844. She carried on a sometimes turbulent, bitter correspondence with her stepsister, until Mary died in 1851.
Florence and death
Clairmont converted to Roman Catholic, despite having hated the religion earlier in her life. She moved to Florence in 1870 and lived there in an expatriate colony with her niece, Paulina. She was also close to Paulina's brother Wilhelm Gaulis Clairmont, the only other surviving child of her brother Charles. She considered making her home with him and financially supported some of his endeavours, for example with £500 towards the purchase of a farm.
Reputation and legacy
Writing for the Wordsworth Trust in 2014, author Lesley McDowell described Clairmont as "the ideal Romanticism woman, as conjured up by Mary Wollstonecraft herself in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman", adding that "rarely did any other Romantic figure “mix in the throng” and attain knowledge of herself through others, to the extent that Claire Clairmont did."
In popular culture
Film
The 1816 trip to Switzerland during the Year Without a Summer, during which Clairmont aimed to reunite with Byron, and Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein, is the focus of multiple modern re-tellings in several mediums. She was portrayed by Myriam Cyr in the 1986 Ken Russell film Gothic, by Elizabeth Hurley in the Goya Award-winning 1988 Spanish film Rowing with the Wind, and by Laura Dern in Haunted Summer (1988).
Literature
Clairmont was depicted in a special edition of the comic book The Wicked + The Divine, as an incarnation of the goddess Inanna and a member of the 1830s Pantheon.
See also
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