Vulgar History Podcast
Claire Clairmont (with Lesley McDowell, Author of Clairmont)
February 28, 2024
Hello, and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. My name is Ane Foster, and this week’s episode was a long time coming, when you think about it. We’re talking today about my girl, Claire Clairmont, who is best known as the, kind of, third wheel stepsister of Mary Shelley, and she’s been mentioned on this podcast twice before. When I did the Mary Shelley episode, Claire Clairmont kind of stormed on the scene and stole my heart. And then also, I did an interview a bit ago with Heather Redmond, who wrote a book called Death and the Sisters, which is about Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont solving a murder mystery. And then, for people who are paid members of the Patreon, I’ve also in the past done a So This Asshole episode about one of Claire’s paramours, but we’ll talk more about that in a second. Anyway, there’s so much more to her story than just, she was Mary Shelley’s stepsister, and she was there that summer in Geneva when Frankenstein was written.
I lost my mind when I saw… This was, like, six months ago when I first heard, just saw the title that Lesley McDowell was writing a book called Clairmont. And I thought to myself, Oh, wouldn’t it be great if that’s about Claire Clairmont? But I was also, like, mitigating expectations, like, I’m sure it’s not, I’m sure it’s just a book called that, I’m sure that’s the name of a street or something. But no! It is a book about Claire Clairmont. It’s, I think, the first novel just telling Claire’s story and really examining who she is as a person. And Lesley McDowell, I invited her on the podcast, again, I’m going to say, like, six months ago. I was like, “Hi, you’ve written this book about Claire Clairmont. I love her. Please come be on my podcast when your book is published, a really long time from now,” and she was like, “Of course!”
So, anyway, finally, the time is here. The book has just come out in the UK. It is called Clairmont, and you should be able to get this wherever you are in the UK. If you’re not in the UK, from what I can tell, you can pre-order it to get it in North America and other places as well. I think it’s coming out maybe in the fall. But there are ways, if you’re in North America, that you can order books from the UK if you poke around a little bit. Anyway, this book exists. I’m so happy that Claire is finally the main character, for once.
So, for this podcast, Lesley joined me just to talk about Claire and how she came to write this book. This is a true Vulgar History episode; we’re going from beginning to end of the whole story of Claire Clairmont. There’s so much I didn’t know until I started prepping for this. Because again, it’s just kind of… One gets the impression that she ran away with Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley, and she was there that summer in Geneva, she had a baby, and then it’s kind of like… I don’t know! I didn’t know until getting ready for this episode/reading Lesley’s novel that I learned all the cool stuff that Claire did and how she really was an icon for a, kind of, independent woman living on her own that I think was very unusual for the Regency era when she lived. It’s still unusual today.
Anyway, I’m so happy to present to you this interview with Lesley McDowell about the one, the only Claire Clairmont. Oh! And also trigger warning: Lord Byron.
Ann: So, I’m joined today by Lesley McDowell, author of the new book Clairmont, which is about Claire Clairmont. Lesley, my first question— Well, first of all, welcome.
Lesley: Thank you.
Ann: My first question for you is: When did you first become interested in Claire Clairmont? Do you remember?
Lesley: Oh, gosh. Yes. It goes back about 25 years ago. I was reviewing a book for a Glasgow newspaper – I’m based in Glasgow in Scotland – it was a newspaper called The Herald. I was reviewing this new publication that was out, which was a newly found, or newly discovered, story by Mary Shelley called Maurice, or the Fisher’s Cot, and the introduction was quite lengthy by a woman called Claire Tomalin, a biographer in the UK. She talks about Mary, obviously, and the Shelleys, and also about Claire.
Now, I knew about Claire vaguely from when I was a student studying Shelley and Byron and stuff. You sort of pass her as you go through all the literary stuff. But for some reason, and I knew she’d had Byron’s child, but for some reason, I just thought she toddled off and died afterwards in the way that women do. I think it’s that thing of if you’re used to 19th-century literature, like, you know, Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, you know, women who transgress in some way, usually sexual transgressions, usually end up dead. And she didn’t.
There was this afterlife; she went to Russia to become a governess, and she lived in Paris. I thought, Oh, this is really interesting! It was just one of those things, I started to look a little bit more, and I found out that she had journals; I found there were volumes of letters. It just got more and more interesting. When I read the biography— The last biography was written in 1992. And I read that. And that was just that it was just mind blowing. I just thought, How do I not know more about this woman? She’s amazing! So, that was when I first had the idea about writing about her in fiction, but I just didn’t know how to do it. I wasn’t experienced enough, at all, really. So, that was my first attempt.
Ann: No, what you just said, it really resonates with me because I think I was the same. When I was, even reading about Mary Shelley, like, that was the first thing I was researching for this podcast, and you come across Claire, and I’m just like, Oh, wow! What a fascinating, interesting person. But because I was focused on Mary Shelley, I never really read about what Claire did next. I think, like you, I just kind of assumed, like, Well, that was it. She had these exciting few years when she was a teenager. But her life continues on. And so, I’m excited to talk to you.
So, what we’re going to do is we’re going to just kind of talk through her life. And I just wanted to say, I have your book here with me. [Lesley laughs] So, the dedication of the book is, “For every Claire Clairmont who fears her story will be forgotten.” And I found that so moving because I think that’s part of what really strikes me about her story is that she was there, her name comes up almost as a footnote in all these other people’s stories. But to her, she was the main character, and she deserves to be the main character.
Lesley: Yeah, I think one of the things that’s quite disturbing, I think about that notion of being forgotten, is that she had to kind of do it herself. While she was alive, she wanted to have a career, she wanted to teach, she wanted to earn her own money. But people couldn’t know that she was connected with the Shelleys and Byron because it was just too scandalous.
So, after Byron’s death in particular in 1824, when people started producing memoirs and biographies of Byron, Mary and Claire together both had to do quite a lot of work to say to, mainly their friends who were writing these books, and say to them, “Please just leave Claire out of it. You can’t include Claire.” So, to a certain extent, she was actually forced into colluding in her own forgetting, as it were, which she really struggled with. She had a terrible time over it because, obviously, it’s a double-edged thing. Having to sit there and read these accounts of people you were with, and they’re not accurate, and there’s nothing you can say; you can’t say anything about it at all. I think she really struggled with that for a long time, right up until her death, really.
I mean, she meets a couple of biographers later in Florence, when she’s living in Florence, towards the end of her life, the late ‘70s, and she starts to, kind of, tell them some things and unburden herself to them. But of course, by then, she’s also playing some games, I think, a little bit, and she’s thinking very much about what she wants the world to know about her, if anyone is going to know anything. I just lost the train of thought of what you originally asked me. I’m wittering on. [laughs]
Ann: No, this is fine. That’s what the podcast is like. So, we’re going to look at Claire’s life, beginning to end. And I will say, your novel, I don’t think this is going to be… First of all, this is not going to be spoilers for your book because it’s a fact that anybody can find. And your book really plays around with time and place and what— So, we’re just going to hit the facts because people, like me, and like you initially, are just kind of like, Well, she was there that summer that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, and that’s kind of it.
We could spend the whole podcast talking about this. Can you explain her parental and step-parents situation? Where did she come from? And what was her family? It’s so complicated.
Lesley: Yeah, it’s really interesting because some details we’ve only just discovered in the last few years. Her mother was a woman called Mary Jane Vial, who already had an illegitimate child by someone (we don’t know who), a little boy called Charles, when she becomes pregnant with Claire. And Claire is born in 1798. Like I said, we only found out recently who her real father was. Claire, throughout her life, believed her father to be some kind of possibly Swiss gentleman. She liked the idea that he was European. Her mother, I think, probably told her a variety of stories. But the truth is, her father was a man called Sir John Lethbridge, who, I think, was a baron or the son of a baron.
Mary Jane Vial kind of ran her own pub. And when she gets pregnant with Claire, she’s not a child; she’s in her late twenties, I think she’s pushing thirty when she gives birth to Claire. And she actually spends some time just after Claire’s birth in a debtor’s prison as well. So, presumably, through the pregnancy stuff, she wasn’t able to work, and there was no financial support, and that’s how she ends up in debtor’s prison. We don’t have any definite information about this, but it looks as though Claire started life really in debtor’s prison. Mary Jane Vial gets out of debtor’s prison and, on behalf of a local curate, takes on her case, and together they write to Sir John Lethbridge, and Sir John Lethbridge actually does give financial support on a monthly basis to Mary Jane for Claire’s upkeep. That is something we knew nothing about, and I don’t think Claire knew anything about it either.
So, fast forward six months, six months after Mary Jane gets out of prison, she winds up in London, and she just happens to be living a couple of doors along from William Godwin. William Godwin, famous radical philosopher, whose wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, has recently passed away. It’s only about I think 18 months to two years after her death, when she was giving birth to her daughter, Mary Godwin. William Godwin is left then with two small children; he has Mary Wollstonecraft’s first daughter, Fanny Imlay (who she had with Gilbert Imlay), and his own child with Mary Wollstonecraft, little Mary Godwin. So, he’s got two daughters to look after. And I think, probably, he needed a wife, and Mary Jane Vial needed a husband, so the two households came together, they got married. To all intents and purposes, it was a good marriage. They have a little boy called William.
Ann: I just wanted to point out, now that William is on the scene as well. So, it’s a household of five children?
Lesley: Yes.
Ann: And each of them has different parents, combination.
Lesley: Yes. And we think that that’s quite, I think, unusual and remarkable and all that, but actually, probably it wasn’t that unusual given the high rates of women’s deaths in childbirth. There are a lot of mixed households, really, I think.
So yeah, Claire and Mary basically grow up together. When Mary’s about 14, she’s sent north to Scotland. It looks as though she’s not getting on with her stepmother, Mary Jane. Mary Jane was clearly quite a force of nature because, at this point, Mary Jane is also running a children’s bookshop and she’s publishing children’s books as well. She is the only bookseller and publisher in London who is a woman at this time, so she’s quite clearly quite a figure. They don’t get on, so Mary is sent north to live with the Baxters in Scotland. I did write a novel back in 2013 about Isabella Baxter, who Mary befriends when she’s living up there in Dundee in Broughty Ferry.
So, Claire’s in the household just with Fanny and William and Charles until Mary comes back when she’s 16. Now, by this point, Shelley, young radical poet who thinks Godwin is wonderful, has been visiting the household. I think Claire and Shelley actually meet first. So, when Mary returns, Shelley comes to visit, and it’s pretty much instant, the chemistry between them. Shelley is married, of course, though, to a woman called Harriet.
So, you fast forward, not very long after this, Mary and Shelley decide to run off to the continent, and they take Claire with them because Claire’s got a real facility for languages, and also, Shelley’s quite keen on her.
Ann: Can we talk about Claire’s— Sorry, just in terms of the facility for languages, when I was reading a bit about Claire to prepare to talk to you about this, because she was given a level of education that I think Mary wasn’t. Claire was taught in a different, a better school or something like that?
Lesley: Their education is slightly different, yes. Like I said, Mary was sent north, and Claire remains in London. But I think also… I think Claire just has a natural facility for languages anyway. It’s not something that Mary’s quite so interested in. So yes, I think there’s probably a lot of homeschooling going on as well because it was all… So much of it was probably, I think, directed by Godwin because he believed girls and boys, like Wollstonecraft did, should have an equal education.
Ann: Oh, and speaking of the Godwins’ beliefs, can we talk about free love for a minute? [Lesley laughs] Because that really affects both Mary and Claire’s decisions throughout their lives, the way that they were raised in this radical household.
Lesley: Yeah. I mean, I think the free love influence, I think more comes from Shelley than anything. I mean, certainly with… Claire, I think really imbibes Mary Wollstonecraft’s philosophies about women’s independence, and women working for themselves, and earning their own money, and you shouldn’t have to be married in order to be, you know, financially secure, and all of this kind of stuff. Shelley, of course, takes it all a step further. Shelley’s really the proponent of free love, as in, we should all have multiple partners if we want, and nobody sticks to one person, and all that kind of thing. That’s really kind of when, later, when they come back from the continent, and he’s kind of pushing Mary towards his friend Hogg, he wants her to sleep with him so that there’s no possession, nobody’s clinging on to one other person.
The problem you have with Shelley is that a lot of his philosophies are quite contradictory. You know, on the one hand, he was also, at this time, trying to disinherit himself because he’s the son of a baron, Sir Timothy Shelley, and he doesn’t believe in inherited wealth. So, he’s trying, legally, to disinherit himself so he doesn’t inherit the house from his father. But at the same time, he depends on his father’s money to be able to pay for things, because Shelley isn’t going to get a job, is he? He’s got no interest in doing that.
So, you’ve got the same thing, I think, with the free love philosophy as well, where they run off to the continent, Shelley, Mary, and Claire, then they come back after a few months, and when they land back at Dover, they’ve got no money to get back to London. So, he writes to Harriet and asks Harriet – his wife, the wife he has abandoned – to pay for them to come back, which she does, thinking that Shelley is coming back to her. Only when Shelley meets her, he says, “No, that’s not what I’m thinking at all. I’m thinking a lovely big commune where we all live together. It’ll all be lovely.” And Harriet’s just like, “Are you kidding me?” Harriet’s pregnant with her second child by Shelley, and now Mary, of course, is pregnant too. So, yeah, free love indeed, which turns out to be rather expensive.
Ann: [laughs] Good point. Great point.
So, they are sort of this trio… Actually, just side note. I don’t know if you saw the Mary Shelley movie from a few years ago, where Elle Fanning was playing Mary Shelley.
Lesley: Yeah.
Ann: Recently, like within the last couple of months, the actress, Bel Powley, who played Claire, and the actor Douglas Booth, who played Shelley, they just got married in real life! They met on that movie and fell in love. I was like, actually, this is beautiful. [laughs]
Lesley: I know. [laughs] It’s amazing, isn’t it? Yeah. They’re a lovely couple.
Ann: They are! They seem like a lovely couple. I mentioned that to my friend, and she saw the movie as well. And she’s like, “Yeah, those two had real chemistry in that movie, it was almost distracting.”
But the Claire, Shelley, Mary… So, you talk about this in your book, which is again, a novel, but Claire and Mary are so similar in age, and they’re raised together, and they have quite opposite personalities, but then they’re both… It’s, like, the three of them (Mary, Claire and Shelley) are together, and it’s always been a sort of like, what was that situation? What was Claire’s role in this relationship? I don’t know how much we could ever really know, but it sort of taints both of the girls, really, by having run off with this man as teenagers, does it?
Lesley: Oh yeah. I mean, you’re talking about, this is the Regency era, this is, you know, Jane Austen. They run off the year after the publication of Pride and Prejudice. I mean, they are both doing Lydia Bennet where they’re doing this; they’re ruining the reputations. It’s interesting that it’s Claire’s mother, Mary Jane, who runs after them. William Godwin, the father, is at home just going, “Oh my God, what are we going to do?” Mary Jane actually gets in a coach, goes to the coast, and then gets a boat across to France herself and chases after them. She does get hold of Claire and tries to persuade her to come back. But you know, Claire is 16 and having the time of her life. She’s just like, “No, I’m having a huge adventure. Absolutely not.”
So, when you sort of fast forward two years later, when Claire’s 18 or 17, just before she meets Byron, she and Shelley and Mary have been living together on and off. Sometimes it breaks down when Mary and Claire fall out, and Mary’s just like, “I’ve had enough. She needs to leave me alone.” And also, of course, this is the period when Mary goes through the loss of her first child as well, and there’s a sense that perhaps Claire doesn’t quite understand, or certainly a sense from Mary of needing, I think, probably quiet and calm and peace around her. And Shelley doesn’t really know quite how to handle it, so he finds it easier to just, you know, let’s go off for a big walk with Claire and leave Mary to it. So, there’s lots of tensions going on, I think, between all three of them at this point, just before Claire meets Byron. And Claire does go off and live for a while in Lynmouth, she goes off on sort of little jaunts just when Mary’s really had enough.
Ann: So, Byron enters the story. How did they meet each other?
Lesley: Well, as far as we know – and there’s lots of different stories about this – but as far as we can tell, it comes through Claire writing to Byron and asking for an audition because he’s one of the directors on the Drury Lane Theatre. She wants to come and audition for him because she does have a remarkable singing voice. He just ignores the first couple of letters, but she’s quite persistent, and she keeps writing. All we know is that eventually he says yes, and ta-da, it seems to have happened from there.
The question mark over it, and you see this in biographies, really from, oh, I would say about the 1990s onwards in particular, this sense of Claire being the one who came up with this idea and really ran with it and really pushed it. You’ll see lots and lots of phrases in lots of biographies about her “laying siege to Byron” and all these, kind of, like, battle metaphors and stuff, and really kind of blaming her as well. It’s a way, I think, of later on, when subsequent things, when they don’t work out, it’s like, it’s her own fault, she pushed for this, she pushed for this.
It’s interesting because William Graham, who is a young journalist who goes to visit Claire towards the end of her life in Florence, records that Claire told him that it was Shelley’s idea that she wrote to Byron in the first place because Shelley wanted to meet Byron, that Shelley was Byron-mad. And Shelley’s biographer, Richard Holmes, has probably written, I think, one of the best biographies ever written, Shelley: The Pursuit, it’s astonishing. The amount of detail he gets hold of is incredible. He also thinks that it’s a bit of a put-up job, that Shelley encourages Claire, it’s Shelley’s idea, and he encourages Claire to write to Byron to try and hook him. He’s really kind of using Claire as bait to try and hook this poet. We know also that Mary knew about it as well because Claire takes Mary to meet Byron after the first couple of meetings.
So, it kind of complicates the picture; it means that it’s not quite so clear that it was Claire who was chasing Byron, but she was kind of pushed towards him. That’s the version that I’ve kind of gone with, I think, in the novel. Not to absolve Claire of blame, but just I think to balance it out a little bit better.
Ann: Yeah, because I think I’ve come across the interpretation that she saw Shelley… Like, Mary was with Shelley, so she wanted to be also with a great celebrity, a great literary figure as well, and so she just harassed Byron into meeting with her. But it’s more nuanced than just that, even if that maybe was part, unconsciously, what she was thinking.
Lesley: Yeah, there’s this idea that she wanted to outdo Mary; she wanted to get someone even more glamorous. It still seems quite odd, though, because Byron was such a star at this time. He was such a literary star, and she’s nobody, she has no connections. The thing that probably would have interested him the most is her connection to William Godwin, because Byron was a big fan of Godwin’s. But yeah, it is all quite strange. It is all quite shrouded in, sort of, claim and counterclaim. It depends on who you kind of want to go with, I think.
Certainly, for fans of Byron, I think Claire is always going to be a sticking point for them because of how he treats her, and I think it kind of absolves Byron a lot, if you can blame Claire for it in the first place, if you can say, “Well, look.” And that’s what Byron says. Byron’s clearly trying to absolve himself much later on, because that’s what he says, “Oh, this girl who comes, you know, traipsing after me, travelling all these hundreds of miles to unphilosophize me,” he says. He doesn’t want to be blamed for what’s happening either.
Ann: So, how do they all get to Geneva for that famous summer?
Lesley: Well, of course, Byron has separated from his wife, Lady Annabella, and it’s quite shocking, because of course, this is an age when divorce isn’t supposed to happen, and there’s all sorts of rumours about exactly why his wife is separating from him, they have a little girl. And then, there’s the rumours of sodomy and all sorts of things coming out, and Byron is really forced into exile. He has to leave the country because they’re really gunning for him. So, he’s very angry, and he’s leaving in a big huff. Shelley has been talking for quite some time about whether… Should he go and live in Europe? Should he stay in England? He can’t decide what to do because he’s getting annoyed by creditors. He’s also lost some chancery suit as well. He’s constantly preoccupied with money and money situations. And so, he’s in a bad temper as well. I think in the midst of all of this, just before Byron leaves, this seems to have been when— Well, we know this is when Claire spends the night with Byron. We don’t know how often it happens, we don’t know how many times they see each other, but we know that obviously this is when she conceives. She doesn’t know that necessarily.
So, Byron goes off to Geneva in May, and Claire decides, or says to him, “We’ll come with you. We’re going to come too. We’re going to come too,” and she suggests it to Mary and Shelley, who are all for it. They’re just like, “Yes, let’s do that. Let’s go.” I think they actually reach Geneva before Byron does, and they take one house and Byron takes the other; Byron takes the bigger house, of course. And then the Shelleys move again, and they have this little cottage that’s nearer Villa Diodati because Byron has all this money. Byron is so rich. This is the other thing: He’s not just a literary star. He’s a rich, handsome, you know, dreadful man [laughs] who’s doing very, very well in one respect. And so, they have this little cottage, sort of, down by the water.
It’s Claire who introduces Byron and Shelley, which I always think is quite a fascinating thing, really. And I have this in the novel quite a few times about her being positioned between them because she is the one who brings them together on the pier at the edge of the lake, and that’s the first time that they meet each other. I do think that’s partly, it’s not just the fact that it’s a few nights later, the storms are happening because of the volcano in Indonesia, causing all sorts of upset with the weather in Villa Diodati, the whole group of them telling ghost stories, all of this kind of stuff. It’s not just because of Frankenstein that that summer matters, but it’s been blown up so much because, of course, Byron and Shelley, these two genius poets coming together and meeting and discussing things. That’s really what kind of pushes Claire out of the picture in terms of literary biography, because she isn’t a literary genius. Mary and Byron and Shelley are the literary geniuses, and Claire isn’t. For all her talents, for all her intelligence and her education, she isn’t one of them.
Ann: Isn’t there a quote – I’m not going to ask you to recite the quote, but I’m sure you’ve come across it – where she said something about, you know, “Why don’t you write also Claire?” And she was like, “In my family, you either need to be a genius, or don’t even bother.” Because it’s not just like Mary and Shelley and Byron, who she’s spending her time with, but also her father, and then also Mary’s mother and then her mother, Mary Jane is this publisher. There’s such a high level of achievement, so I can see that that would be very daunting.
Lesley: Yeah, but I think she was also quite… She was quite a bold person anyway, and I think she had that early confidence that you have at that age, at 18. You know, she’s been surrounded by genius her whole life, as you say, brought up in the household of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, you know, words all around her, kind of thing. So, I don’t think she’s intimidated by genius necessarily, and she’s very supportive of it as well. She’s always supportive of Mary’s genius throughout her life, and she refers to it as genius, which we know is a word that’s nearly always applied to men. You know, it’s the old, “Men have genius, women have talent,” kind of thing. She’s very forceful about Mary’s genius.
So, I don’t think she was necessarily intimidated by it. Yes, there is that quote of her saying, you know, “If you can’t think of something that by its nature is the most original thing ever, then just don’t bother,” but she was clever, and she could appreciate literature properly, and she could hold her own, I think, in conversations. There’s never any sense that she doesn’t really, kind of, know what to say, or that she’s saying something stupid or foolish, I don’t think.
Ann: Yeah. And I think that’s also sort of an impression that one might get about Claire Clairmont just from the way she’s often talked about just a little bit, or she’s kind of a small role, documentaries, or films, or things like that; she’s just kind of Mary’s, like, silly sister. It’s kind of like Lydia Bennet put into this summer in Geneva, where it’s like, no, she actually is, like, very intelligent, and like you said, she has this facility for languages and stuff. Yeah, she can keep up.
Lesley: Yeah. I mean, she tried to write as well. She wrote a short story called “The Pole,” and she was starting work on a short story called “The Idiot,” which we don’t really have, I don’t think we’ve got anything left of that. So, she was thinking about writing too, but primarily, she was kind of in training to be a teacher; she wanted to teach and teach music. So, she was thinking in terms of a career. She wasn’t trying to ensnare Byron, and she didn’t want to get married. All of that was very genuine. She really took on a lot of Shelleyan principles early on that she really didn’t abandon. She stuck with them, which I think is really interesting because that’s really kind of what sees her through, I think, the tragedies to come as things just kind of implode, really.
Ann: Well, let’s talk about that implosion, which, part of that is what happens with her child with Byron. And actually, sorry, pause. I want to talk about names for a second, because we’ve been calling her Claire all along, but her name was Jane, and then she chose to change her name to Claire. One of her middle names is Clara, so it didn’t come out of nowhere. And her surname was Clairmont, but that was a surname her mother, Mary Jane, had invented because…?
Lesley: Yes.
Ann: Right? Yeah. So, there’s just a lot of names. In your book, you play around with this, what she’s called at different times, so I just wanted to talk about that for a second.
Lesley: Yeah, I think the naming thing is really interesting because, yeah, she lives by the name Claire Clairmont by this point, and both those names are invented. Her first name is an invention, and so is her surname, although she doesn’t know her surname is an invention. She thinks Clairmont is a real man who fathered her. So, I do think the question of names is really interesting, particularly for women, because they lose their names on marrying.
Ann: Because then she has a child, the child she has with Byron is a daughter, who initially, she calls Alba, which is a play on her nickname… So, Lord Byron is L.B., and people call him Elbee, like L.B. for Lord Byron. So, then she calls the daughter Alba, presumably as kind of an ode to him, and he’s like, No. [laughs] Let’s change this child’s name to Allegra, actually. So, names are just changing.
Lesley: Names are changing, and there’s a lot of status in a name as well. I mean, it’s interesting that Byron chooses the name Allegra, which is much more classical. Those kinds of classical names have more status because one thing he does do, he does acknowledge Allegra as his own. He doesn’t try and pretend… I mean, apart from there is that quote where he says, “Is the brat mine?” he writes to one of his friends, and he just says, “Well, I know it is, so much as one can know these things.” But he does take on board that the child, this little girl, is his. So, he is very conscious of himself as a Byron and that his daughter is a Byron as well. She is Allegra Byron; he doesn’t deny her his name. And I know, I mean, these days we sort of think, How big of him, that was great. But in those days, I think that was probably quite important. But it does feed into why Claire is ready and willing to hand her daughter over to this man.
I have had a couple of people ask me when she finds out that she’s pregnant to Byron, why is she so willing to give her child up? Especially when you think that her mother managed with two children, she wasn’t married, although her mother did end up in debtor’s prison, so maybe didn’t manage quite so well. It wasn’t easy; she’s 18 years old, and she has nothing. She really has nothing. The best contact in the world she has is William Godwin, her stepfather, who is broke, he is perpetually broke. So, there’s no money at her back. The only kind of support she’s got is from Shelley. Shelley, at this point, is currently supporting two women, Mary and Harriet; he has two children by Harriet, he’s got a child with Mary, and he’s supporting Claire as well. His big fear, if Claire kept the child, was that his father would hear about this, and everybody would just assume that Claire’s child was Shelley’s by Claire. That this would be the final straw and his father really would cut off all financial support, that would be it.
Ann: So, even though he wanted to be cut off from his father, he didn’t want to be cut off from his father’s money.
Lesley: Yeah. So, this is the contradiction with him, you know, wanting to be disinherited. “I don’t want to inherit the title. I don’t want to inherit this grand mansion, field place, blah, blah, blah. But yes, could you please still give me my money so that,” like I said, “I don’t have to get a job.” So, he’s still got quite a lot of money. It’s not like he’s impoverished or anything like that, but it would cause problems.
There’s also… It’s interesting, much later on, a few years down the line, when, I don’t mean to jump ahead, I’m hoping I’m not doing that too much, but when Claire is begging Byron to let her see her child, and she comes up with this scheme to Shelley, saying, “Look, why don’t we rescue her? She’s in a convent. Why don’t we go and rescue her?” And Shelley’s horrified, he’s just like, “No, what if Byron challenges me to a duel? I might die.” [laughs] And you’re just like, Byron is too big and strong and rich. And even Mary says the same thing. She says, “Is this what you want? Seriously, Claire? Do you want Shelley to fight Byron, and he’ll die?” In any case, Byron, she said, “He has all the money, all these resources. He would just hunt down you and your child and take her back anyway. So, there’s no point.”
So yes, she has nothing. She is not in a position of power, and she goes very quickly, I think, from being in a position of, she’s an 18-year-old girl with all of these plus points, you know, she’s attractive, she’s intelligent, she’s mixing with these literary geniuses. And then, suddenly, it’s really kind of all taken away because the truth of the matter is that she’s a penniless, 18-year-old, single mother, and you have nothing. You really do have nothing.
Ann: Yeah, and that’s the thing. That’s where I kind of… One might understand why her mother went to try and bring her home, age 16, because what her mother went through being the single mother, being in debtor’s prison, she could see a long view of where Claire was headed, whereas Claire was just in the moment, having so much fun.
Lesley: I know. And I do think it’s such a shame that her mother didn’t tell her the truth about her origins, and tell the truth about her past, because she might have been able to advise her daughter. Claire didn’t tell her mother about the child that she had with Byron, and you just kind of think, her mother would have been a good person to have had by her side and to have fought for her. Now, she might not have. I mean, Mary Jane Vial might have taken the opposite line. She might have said, “Yeah, absolutely. You have to give your child over to Byron. There’s no point in even fighting it. Just do it and don’t think twice about it.” But you can’t help feeling she actually needed a stronger support, I think, behind her. Certainly, if she was going to take on somebody like Byron. And she did! That’s a remarkable thing. She actually did take him on. I mean, her letters to him after she’s handed Allegra over to him are astonishing. She really fights for her.
Ann: Well, I was just thinking, she had that own strength in herself to be fighting for her daughter, but if she had someone in her corner besides these… You know, taking this story and putting the emphasis on Claire, in the background, Shelley and Mary are just kind of these flakes. They don’t know any better than she does what to do. They’re all just kind of 20-year-olds doing the best they can, but they don’t know what they’re doing. They have skills, but their skills are not to live life well. [laughs]
Lesley: No, I think particularly Shelley. It’s funny, when I first started to write about Claire, it was back in 1998, and… I mean, I still think Shelley is the greatest poet that England ever produced, I think he’s astonishing. And I think at that age, you kind of fall for Shelley. I think I was probably in love with Shelley as well, as you would be at that age, because he’s so radical and revolutionary, and he’s kind of sexy. Byron is just… not so much. I mean, he is mad, bad, and dangerous to know, but he just doesn’t come across, I think, as well as Shelley does.
It’s not until you’re older, I think, and you look back… Writing this again, I just thought, yes, Byron is… Really lock up your daughters; you don’t want your young 18-year-old girl anywhere near that man. But Shelley is actually the really dangerous one to me, to my mind, because, well, you only have to look at it, I mean, this is a man, when he dies in 1822, when he drowns, he leaves a trail of death behind him. There’s Fanny Imlay; there’s his first wife, Harriet Shelley, who walks into the Serpentine and drowns herself; there are all the children, the children who have died, William and Clara. It’s just a lack of care and consideration for other people. He’s just not able to do it. And you can say, yes, he’s a literary genius, and he’s a great poet, and he is. But he wasn’t good. He wasn’t good for women and children, is really what I mean. And I think if he hadn’t died young, I’m not sure Mary would have survived many more years with him.
Ann: Didn’t he make everybody do this demented vegetarian diet where they only ate potatoes, or something like that?
Lesley: [chuckles] There’s quite a lot of stories like that about him. I don’t know how much of them are true. I think he was certainly someone who liked fads, and he would take up with things, and then discard them quite quickly. But yeah, he did stay a vegetarian throughout his life. And he was also, he supported the abolition of slavery, he refused to have sugar, for example, in his tea. He would sweeten his tea with raisins; he wouldn’t use sugar.
Ann: Oh, wow. Yeughhh! But also, good for him. But also, eughhh!
Lesley: [laughs] Yeah, exactly. You would just do without the raisins, really. But yeah, he had principles, but some of the principles weren’t the right ones, and I think one of the things I have clear say in the novel is about the famous defense of poetry that he writes where he talks about, you know, “A poet is a nightingale that sits in its own solitude, sings its own song, and cheers itself in its own solitude” type thing. And then, you look at his life, and he just had to constantly have women around him. He just had to have this harem of women, constantly, and he was constantly having crushes on other women. I mean, Mary just had to put up with him constantly writing poems to this woman, writing poems to that woman. Oh, he’s in love with this woman now and in love with that woman. And yes, you can see, well, he’s holding true to his principles of free love and no possessions. But you just kind of think, by this point, this woman has given birth four or five times to your children. You’ve got obligations. There are things that you need to start standing up for, and they’re not having crushes. It’s actually trying to just get your children to adulthood without dying first. Can you do that?
I think when the news comes through of Allegra dying in 1822, in the spring of 1822, and he talks about having this nightmare of seeing this naked female child rising up out of the sea and accusing him, and he is fighting with Mary all the time, they’re just quarrelling, and of course, Mary’s had a miscarriage. He rushes off to the village at one point to try and buy prussic acid (which is a classic suicide poison), I do think when he then goes sailing off to meet Byron, he leaves Lerici and goes up to Livorno to see Byron with Edward Williams, I do think on the sail back, he was sailing into what he knew would be absolute disaster. The day that they sail out, there’s a terrible storm coming, and no other boats are going out that day. Nobody else is sailing, and he insists on still going out. I think, by that point, there’s an element he just couldn’t live with himself anymore. You can see, there’s only so much tragedy you can deal with, and I do think Allegra was the last straw. I think he was devastated by Allegra’s death.
Ann: So, Mary Shelley had one surviving child who grew into adulthood. The others died as infants of various diseases, or she miscarried. Allegra died very young, age five, I think, of typhus or something like that, in the convent. Well, you were just saying the string of deaths behind him.
So, if we… This is kind of where we often leave Claire, so I’m excited to get into the next era, which is Allegra has died, Shelley has died, Mary kind of devotes herself to memorializing Shelley and publishing his work and advocating for him. What does Claire do next?
Lesley: Well, first of all, Claire had a plan, even before Shelley’s death, what she was going to do was go to Vienna, where her brother Charles was working as a professor and to teach there. She was going to teach music and singing. So, she does, she goes to Vienna. It all goes kind of horribly wrong— Well, before she goes to Vienna, sorry.
Ann: How many times have you said that? [laughs]
Lesley: [laughs] Sorry!
Ann: No, it’s fine. It’s her life, it’s not your words. But everything just constantly keeps going horribly wrong for her.
Lesley: It does, really. Well, she has a little, sort of, romantic interlude. After the death of Shelley, there’s a man called Edward Trelawney who appears. He’s befriended Byron and Shelley just before Shelley’s death, and he’s kind of like a big sort of Byronic figure, and she has a bit of a fling with him, but it’s not enough to make her think, Well, I’ll just hang around with him. So, she sticks to her plan; she goes to Vienna.
She gets very ill. I think she probably really has a breakdown, the equivalent of a breakdown. She’s physically ill. She says later on in life that she almost died when she was in Vienna, she got so ill. There’s also, the secret police are onto both Charles and Claire because they’ve gotten wind of connections with Godwin and Shelley. So, she kind of has to leave Vienna, so she’s not in Vienna for very long. Instead of going west, though, or going back to England, she decides to go further east. She goes to Russia. I do think it’s partly getting away from the name. She’s obviously hoping the further away she goes, the better chance she has of being anonymous and not being connected with Godwin and Shelley and so on.
So yeah, she gets employed as a governess with one rich Russian family after another. English governesses were really popular and in demand in Russia at this time. The richest Russian families, the nobles, they all spoke French; they didn’t speak Russian, they spoke French. That suited Claire perfectly because she was fluent, but she could also read and obviously speak English and other languages. It’s quite a sort of different setup from… We think of governesses in England in a very kind of Jane Eyre-type way, you know, it’s quite grim and austere, and you’re in your little governess’s bedroom, and it’s all, you know, quite horrible, or you’re exploited by your employer in some horrible way.
In Russia, her letters that she writes about life in Russia as a governess are just incredible. They’re just so full of life, and they’re so vibrant. And it is crazy, it is absolutely crazy. In Russian families, the governess was part of the family, like a cousin or an aunt or whatever. So, you were expected to partake in all the family events and all the rest of it, and you ate with the family; you didn’t eat with the servants in the kitchen, you ate with the family. I have her being quite cheeky to her employer because she is, she is quite cheeky. She describes parties and all sorts of events and everything going on. So, it was very… In one sense, it was freer because I think it was socially much more freer. Intellectually, it wasn’t because they had to be careful.
The year that I have picked, 1825, so it’s three years after the death of Shelley and Allegra, and she’s in Russia. At the end of 1825, there will be an assassination of the Tsar by the Decembrists because it’s in December of 1825. And then, the forces of conservatism really do take over. So, it’s already a place where you have to be careful politically, what you say, and it gets much worse after 1825. So, she’s got lots to say about life there.
This is, I think, where Claire really comes into her own because even if she didn’t know the Shelleys, even if she hadn’t met Byron, if she had gone to Russia and we had these two volumes of amazing letters and journals just on their own, what an amazing account we would have of this woman who lived independently until she was 79 in various parts of Europe. It’s just extraordinary! And to write about it all so well.
Ann: And didn’t Mary Shelley, I think she wrote in a letter as well, she complimented, she said, Claire writes the best letters of anyone she knows.
Lesley: Yes, and they are. They’re so detailed, they’re so full of life. She’s also very… I think she really connects with a modern audience, particularly because she’s so emotionally frank in her letters. We’re used to particularly male literary figures in their letters, they can be quite formal, they like to employ lots of rhetorical devices because they’ve all had a classical education. So, they’re all playing clever tricks in their letters. Claire hasn’t had that kind of education, and she just goes right to the heart of the matter; she’s very direct in her letters. I mean, she writes beautifully, but she also writes really honestly and really clearly. It’s the kind of writing I think that we tend to value now much more than the, sort of rhetorical fanciness. We don’t really appreciate that in the same way.
Ann: Well, it’s so much more… I mean, to me and just to the average person, I would say it’s so much more easy to read. It’s more relatable. Like, I don’t know all the allusions that someone with that education are making, where they’re writing to impress other intellectuals, but she’s just writing to explain what she’s doing, and I think that’s so much more appealing.
Lesley: I think quite often the male literary figures are often writing deliberately to obscure meaning. They’re trying to keep things as obscure as possible, almost. They don’t want to reveal too much of themselves, and she’s the exact opposite. She wants to get things off her chest. She’s saying exactly how she feels about certain things in a certain situation.
Ann: So, she continues living on as an independent woman, which I think is impressive, and also speaks to the influence of Mary Wollstonecraft’s writings when she was growing up. But then also, kind of the Shelley stuff. Like, it clearly was important to her to remain independent. She could have probably married someone at some point, but she chose to never do that.
Lesley: Oh yeah, she had quite a few marriage proposals over the years. There’s one moment where a female friend of hers, Mrs. Mason from Italy, who was Lady Mount Cashell, another woman living in sin, she says, I think later on to Mary, “Oh, it’s a shame that Claire didn’t accept Thomas Love Peacock’s proposal.” Thomas Love Peacock really liked her. He is a writer, and he has, you know, a big manor house in England. And I just always thought whenever I read that bit, I just thought, Which would you rather have? By the way, Thomas Love Peacock, Claire found him a deadly, dull bore and used to hide when he came to the house. [Ann laughs] And he was much older than she was as well. And I just thought, yes, would you rather be living in some dull, old manor with Mr. Boring, hidden away, somewhere in England? Or would you rather have your own apartment in Paris and be living independently? Yes, not a difficult choice to make!
She’s very honest, again, about that too, because she doesn’t need that status. She’s not chasing marital status or anything like that; it frees her up to do these extraordinary things. I mean, she’s in Russia for quite a long time, almost a decade, and then she comes back to England for a while, and she helps nurse her mother as well when her mother’s dying. And it’s just immediately after her mother dies that she decided to go to Paris and live and work there, and she spends most of the 1840s in Paris as well.
Ann: All of this, everything you just said about her, would you rather live in this house with this boring man or have the apartment in Paris? I’m like, of course, the apartment in Paris! But it’s just so rare that a woman in this time period, in this era, is able to make that choice. Often because of financial reasons, entirely because of financial reasons, people end up having to marry the boring man. But she always wanted to have her own money, so she was teaching, she was a governess. She always found a way. And that wasn’t a means to an end to go off and happily, or not happily, but just to marry somebody and live that conventional life.
I just find it so impressive because it’s rare, even today, culturally. I’m sure it’s the same in Scotland as it is where I’m in Canada or in the United States, like, there’s such a pervasive pressure on young women to get married, have children. And it’s strange, to me, as an unmarried person, I’ve felt this pressure, and I’m just like, Why?! Why does everyone care? So, I can’t even imagine the pressure that Claire was up against in the 1800s.
Lesley: Oh, yeah. I remember when I went to buy my first flat, it was in 1996, and I went to the bank to see about a mortgage. That was when I got my first, like, proper grown-up job, when I got a lecturing job at the University of St Andrews, and I thought, Right, I’m going to buy a flat. I remember going to various banks to see what mortgage deals they had to offer, and you’re just surrounded by posters of couples, heterosexual couples, because that’s who they’re selling their mortgage deals to, because that’s the ideal family unit. I think it’s really interesting that we, as a society, particularly just now, are so in love with the Jane Austen ideal of marriage. Even though she was satirizing the marriage market, she never suggested an alternative to marriage. It was always you had to get a good marriage. And it’s almost like we’re still in love with that idea of it; still the romantic ideal, but also the practical and the financial ideal.
So yes, to have someone like Claire, I’m sure that’s partly, actually, why I liked her story so much, because I was single, I was working for myself, I was living on my own. And here’s this woman doing it 200 years before as well, and it’s not easy because nothing’s set up. Society isn’t set up; it’s not encouraging you to do this, it doesn’t like you to do this, it doesn’t like women to do this on their own. So, you’re battling all the time, and that’s what she was doing. She was constantly having to go from job to job. She never stayed too long in one particular place. It is a difficult life; it’s not easy, she’s living all over the place.
But it’s also a life of incident and adventure and love. There’s a lot of passion. She was someone who was still, I think, sexually active when she was in middle age. Even when she was an old lady, her niece, Paola… When these two young— Well, one’s younger than the other, William Graham and Edward Silsbee, the two journalists, well, one’s a journalist and the other’s a collector of letters, and they wine and dine her to try and get access to the Byron Shelley letters. Her niece, Paola, talks about her aunt flirting with them and being all coy and all this stuff. Yeah, she was like that; she was a sexual being, and that’s something else we tend to want to crush, especially as women get older, and she didn’t.
She was living in Paris, and I’m quite sure— I don’t want to give away spoilers either about the man she is with in Paris, and I don’t have proof, as I say in the afterword of the novel, I don’t have proof that this is who she had the affair with. But she was having an affair in Paris, and I do feel very strongly that it was this man, this particular individual, which of course, had, I think, it come out at that particular time, would have been extremely shocking.
Ann: I love… I’m just trying to, I can’t think of someone else to compare her to, who is this… Maybe Samantha in Sex and the City or something, [Lesley laughs] just somebody who’s a woman aged 40-plus, who is just like, independent, and a sexual being and just enjoying her life and is not hewing to those conventional… I don’t know. I love that she never gave up was like, “Fine, I’ll just marry someone, I’ll just become conservative and boring.” Like, that’s just not who she was. And again, as somebody who just didn’t know anything she did after the summer in Geneva, I’m just like, this is better than I could have ever imagined for her, that she just continued being herself. Yeah.
Lesley: Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think towards the end, she did convert to Catholicism in the last couple of years of her life. Certainly, we also now have a fragment of what looks like a memoir, where she calls both Byron and Shelley “Monsters of free love” and “selfish beings” and all this kind of stuff, so it does look like she’s going back on some of her attitudes when she was younger, which wouldn’t be terribly surprising. She’s very elderly, and at this point, she’s been living in Italy, a Catholic country, for a long time. I also think the conversion to Catholicism is because she had money, and she wanted a proper headstone in a proper cemetery. She wanted some kind of, you know, not quite a massive tomb, but she wanted some kind of recognition about who she was in death. Because that’s her final thing about, you know, she doesn’t want to end her life in oblivion, or for her story to be lost in oblivion as her life has been.
Ann: I was just double-checking the dates. So, Mary Shelley died about 20 years-ish, 25 years before Claire did.
Lesley: Yes.
Ann: So, even that, where the two of them are so parallel, they were just a few months apart in age, and then they grew up together as sisters, they’re sort of two sides (and you play with this in your book quite a few times), you know, they’re kind of two halves, they are parallels, the yin and yang. So, Claire, of everyone who was at that, in Geneva that summer, like she’s the last one standing, I think. Yeah.
Lesley: Yeah. And for quite a long time, because, you know, up until 1853, I think it is when Mary dies, it’s just her and Mary who are left, because Polidori has killed himself, Byron has died, you know, fighting the Turks, although he didn’t actually do any fighting, and Shelley has drowned. So, it’s just the two of them. And then, after 1853, it’s just Claire. She’s the only one left, and she does live for quite a long time after that.
I think her life in Florence is kind of presented, if you read The Aspern Papers by Henry James, which is a sort of novelization, or a novella, of her last moments or her last days in Florence, it looks very pitiful, and it looks very, kind of… She comes across as basically just living with ghosts. She has ghosts all around her; she has this shrine to Shelley and all the rest of it. I think I don’t believe that either. I mean, I love Henry James, he’s one of my favourite writers, but he does have a man killing off Claire in The Aspern Papers, and I’m sorry, but no man killed Claire. She survived them all. Her last two letters are to the man I think she was involved with in Paris, so there was still stuff going on. I mean, even in old age, she was still a formidable presence, and I don’t think she was just living with ghosts. I think she was somebody who lived very much in the present as well. Because I don’t think you can live the kind of life that she lived and not have to deal with the present constantly.
Ann: I saw, I think this is on your Instagram, you had a picture of her memorial, which is in Florence. Is that where…?
Lesley: Yes.
Ann: So, can you describe where that is and what that is?
Lesley: All it is – I went this summer, or last summer – she’s buried in the cemetery Antella, which is just in the hills above Florence, so you can just get a bus from the center of Florence up there. It’s this beautiful cemetery with lovely arches and these lovely black and white tiles on the ground, and she had paid for and bought a big tombstone and an inscription and all the rest of it.
And then, in the 1920s, I don’t know for what reason it was, but anyway, a lot of the tombs of the graves were dug up, and the bones of people there were mixed together, just shoved under this ground under one of the stretches of the arches and tiled over. So, that’s what she has now. Her bones are just mixed in with other people’s, and she has a tile, one tile, saying her name and her date of birth. You just think, yeah, that’s what happens to women when they don’t toe the line. [laughs]
Ann: No, exactly. So, I forgot to tell you about this before, but you’ve listened to my podcast before, so you know that at the end of these sorts of discussions, I like to score everybody in four different categories. So, I will go over the categories with you, and I’m really intrigued to see where Claire is going to land. And then afterwards, you can see where does she compare to Mary Shelley.
The first category is Scandaliciousness, so how scandalous… And I mean, and this is very much, like, in the time and place where she lived, how scandalous was she seen as being? She lived a long time, and she lived in various places, but if we just think overall, or what was the highest peak of scandalousness? I think this is going to be a high number.
Lesley: Oh, yeah. I think it would be hard to be more scandalous than Claire. I would say 9 out of 10, only because she didn’t actually shoot a man with a gun. [Ann laughs] I think if she did that, that would be… That’s the one thing she did actually do.
Ann: Yeah, yeah. And maybe, you know, if they had gone through with a kidnap attempt on Allegra, it would have turned into that, but we didn’t get to that shootout moment for her.
Lesley: Yeah, yeah. Sadly.
Ann: I think, in every way, just in general, even just not being a married woman, I think, was scandalous; living on her own was scandalous. But the fact that she had the child with Byron, that she was travelling in this throuple, really.
Lesley: [laughs] Yeah, it truly is, isn’t it? It really is a throuple.
Ann: Yeah. Okay. So, 9.
The next category is Schemieness, so this is both, like, literal schemes, but also, just kind of how she got by… Her plans, like, did she come up with plans? Did she execute? So, you know, you kind of debunk the fact that she had a scheme to snare Byron; that was not necessarily a scheme of hers. But I think just in terms of… I think the fact that she was able to continue to find work, to find employment, I think she always had a plan, if we define schemes in that way.
Lesley: Yes, I think she had that one focus, I think, that one thing of: always support yourself. That was her one, sort of, guiding light. So, when there were… I mean, schemes, plans fell by the wayside constantly, and they were constantly falling apart, and all sorts of crazy things. I mean, a good example, for example, is when she did inherit some money, Shelley left her some money, and Mary said, “We should invest this in an opera box, you get really good returns.” You buy an opera box, you get really you rent it out, you get really good returns on it. And then, at the last minute, Mary pulls out and said, “No, I don’t think this is sensible at all. Actually, I don’t think we should do this.” And Claire goes, “No, I really like this idea. I’m going to keep going with it.” And she loses all our money. [Ann laughs]
So, I mean, from a sort of practical point of view, I think she was hopeless at plans and schemes. But she had that inner strength, I think she had that inner core that was able to just, kind of, plow on through no matter what.
Ann: So, that might if we balance the two things out, that might be something like a 5, where, like, she was bad at schemes, but she was good at, kind of, keeping going.
Lesley: Yeah, 5 or 6.
Ann: Let’s say 5.5.
Okay, the next one, I’m really interested what you’ll think about this. It’s the Significance. So, this is where her significance, I mean, she has been largely forgotten. But what was her significance, you know? She met all these important people, she was part of this important family dynasty, she did live this singular life. But overall, like, the fact that her grave is now a tile, like, she’s not remembered for her significance, which doesn’t mean she doesn’t have any.
Lesley: Yeah. I mean, it is that thing because I mean, as I was saying before, her significance is the life that she led, and the written account that she has left us in letters and diaries, and we know because women largely didn’t participate in public life as much. These are private forms, these are private art forms, letters and diaries, and so they’re not valued as much, they’re not considered as important, they don’t have the same status.
So, what is hugely valuable about her, to us, as a sort of literary record, but also socially as a record of a woman who was, you know, managing on her own, is hugely important. I mean, I don’t think it can possibly be underestimated. But it’s been suppressed, and it’s suppressed because that’s a story that even now, still, society doesn’t really want to embrace and celebrate. Not really. So, I don’t know how to answer that question in terms of… I think her significance for women is 10 out of 10. Significance in terms of how a patriarchal society assesses women and their achievements would be next to nothing. But patriarchal society is wrong.
Ann: Well, I’ll just let you know the next category I think could make up for any deficits in this category, [Lesley laughs] if that affects her score, because the next category is the Sexism Bonus, how much did the patriarchy and sexism hold her back? So, what if we say, for Significance, what if we do another 5, because she is significant, but she’s not remembered as significant. But then, for Sexism, I feel like that’s a 10 out of 10. I think that her legacy is forgotten because of sexism; her life was extra challenging. All those things, like, she had to suppress the fact that she was the mother of Byron’s child, because that could get in the way of her finding employment. So much of what she was doing was twice as hard because she had to always be making up for it.
Lesley: Yes. I think it’s interesting the way that society, culture, literature embraces Mary, because Mary is, I think, slightly safer. She’s a safer option; she’s a mother, she held up Shelley’s legacy, and she worked to that end. But she’s kind of non-threatening in the way that Claire is by Claire’s eschewing of marriage, just refusing it.
So yeah, I think it’s good that she gets 10 out of 10 for Sexism and a lower score perhaps in Significance because she shouldn’t be significant in a patriarchal judgment. She should be less because patriarchy cannot value someone like Claire; it’s not capable of valuing her because it doesn’t understand her. It only understands her to crush her.
Ann: Well, and like you were saying earlier on about the way that her relationship with Byron was portrayed, in order for Byron fans to understand how cruel he was to her, they have to make it be her fault. So, I think that ties into that as well. We need to think of her as this, kind of, bimbo, who was just hanging out there with all these brilliant people, because if we see her as a person, then we have to reckon with Byron was terrible, which, Byron was terrible, but apparently, there’s people who don’t want to think that.
Lesley: Yeah, I mean, I still see her being described as clueless, a groupie. Even now, I see that on Twitter. If you’ve ever watched Ken Russell’s film, Gothic, you’ll see her being portrayed as a, sort of, nymphomaniac, crazy woman, who’s barely capable of stringing two words together. It’s really interesting how we have to kind of box these women in so quickly, and she is in the box marked, you know, crazy chick who, we don’t have to pay any attention to her because she’s just nuts, but in a kind of sexy way, so that’s okay.
Ann: It’s funny, though, too, because like, in your book, again, you do mention a lot Claire herself, because it’s her point of view, seeing herself and as another half of Mary and how they are different from each other. But I think, in a very facile way, perhaps movie makers or other people say, Okay, Claire and Mary have to be very different from each other, and if Mary is the heroine, then we need to make Claire this, like, nymphomaniac groupie weirdo. There’s other ways to make two people be different than each other, but that seems to be the fallback.
Lesley: Yeah. Also, there’s always a stress on how much they fell out. And actually, there was a lot of support on both sides, even as they got older. I mean, yes, the novel is really bookended by this terrible row that Claire and Mary have, and it’s the last time that they ever see each other, but they did support each other, actually, throughout their lives, particularly after the death of Shelley. You know, there was harmony there sometimes, there was sisterly support.
But yes, it’s almost as though, portraying them on the screen, they have to be reduced. I get that that happens to men, too. I mean, Byron is always portrayed on screen as just this sort of, you know, like, handsome idiot, really, [laughs] and Shelley is a bit mad and eccentric, and obviously they’re more than that. But yeah, I think particularly the sort of one-dimensional views of Claire are particularly harmful, and it almost feels political, as though it is trying to give a message over to women of, “Don’t you dare do this because it’ll all end up bad for you.” And she’s living proof that, you know, she survived them all, and she actually had a good life, that’s the thing. In spite of the tragedy. That early tragedy could have finished her, and it didn’t.
Ann: I need to tell you the score that she landed on is 29.5. Mary Shelley, 29.
Lesley: [laughs] Yay!
Ann: So, [laughs] at least in this scale, Claire wins this round.
Lesley: Yes.
Ann: I think it’s the scandal. I think Mary Shelley was scandalous, but I think Claire was seen as… Because she never got married. You know, Mary Shelley ran away and married as a teenager, but then she was quite conventional for the rest of her life, really, or she was seen to be.
Lesley: Yeah. Yeah, she really was. And Claire really was the rebellious one. I’ve said this before. I wrote a blog piece about Claire’s letters many, many years ago, and I said, “To me, she is Mary Wollstonecraft’s natural daughter, more so than Mary Shelley was,” I think. She’s the real goth girl.
Ann: She is! Yeah. Actually, that’s such a good point, and Mary Wollstonecraft also spent time in Paris, travelling around. Yeah.
Lesley: Yes, absolutely.
Ann: So, your book. I want to tell the listeners as well that this interview has been a long time coming because I feel it was, like, six months ago or something. I saw that there was a book called Clairmont, and I thought… Part of me was like, Oh my gosh, maybe it’s a book about Claire Clairmont! But the rest of me was like, No, no, of course it’s not going to be a book about Claire Clairmont. And then I looked it up, and I’m like, it is a book about Claire Clairmont! [Lesley laughs] And I messaged you, and I was just like, “Please come on my podcast.” I know your book isn’t published for six or nine months, or however long ago this was, but it was so important to me to bring you on as someone who can actually speak to this woman who has so fascinated me for so long. I’m so happy that she’s the main character, for once, in your book.
Lesley: Well, thank you so much for asking me because it’s just… I think the thing I want more than anything is I just want people to know about her. I just want people to know about her life, and who she was, and that she mattered. The whole thing that she was so exercised about that, you know, this whole thing about, “My life will pass in oblivion, and my story will disappear,” she knew herself that she had an important story.
She wasn’t just an important counter, I think, to all the biographies that were coming out about Byron and the sort of things that they were saying about him. But I think also she’s a corrective to the Austen, Regency, marriage, conventional setup. She is someone saying, no, it’s perfectly possible to have a very different kind of life and live it well. I’m not saying that she necessarily consciously was living in a certain way and saying to women around her, you know, look at me, look at me. But I think she, I think she was aware that she was doing things differently and that that was important and that it was important for that to be seen because she had nieces who I think did look up to her, Cleary and Paola both. Interestingly, Paola, her niece, has an illegitimate daughter, a little girl called Georgette, I think it is. So yeah, I think she was aware that she had a strong story.
Ann: Well, thank you so much. Your book, Clairmont, when this interview airs, people should be able to pick up a copy of that, and I strongly encourage everybody to.
Lesley: Oh, thank you very much. And thank you so much for asking me, because it’s just lovely to talk about Claire. Thank you for your lovely questions as well.
Ann: Thank you so much.
Lesley: Thank you!
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So, during the interview, you may have noticed the part in which Lesley referred to Claire as the true, I think she said the real goth queen or the true goth queen. And that got me thinking about the classic Vulgar History design. We have the Mary Shelley one. It’s designed by Karyn Moynihan friend of the podcast. It says “Goth Queen Mom Friend,” which is about Mary Shelley. And I have decided, I couldn’t not, so anyway, Karyn again has fabulously taken her original design and kind of defaced it, she’s kind of vandalized it to change it from “Goth Queen Mom Friend” to “The Real Goth Queen Superstar.” It says on it, also, “Claire was here.” So, it’s a Claire Clairmont merch design that you can now get at the various merch stores that we have for Vulgar History.
You can go to VulgarHistory.com/Store, that’s got the best shipping for people in the US, or if you’re outside the US, go to VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com. Both of these have the Claire Clairmont design, or you can get the Claire Clairmont and also the Mary Shelley design. No one has to choose just one. You can stan both of them. I mean, they’re both such iconic people. It’s just that Claire really has gone so underappreciated for so long, for all the reasons we talked about in this episode.
And oh, yeah! I wanted to let you know that I’m on Substack, I’ve got a little newsletter thing. So, every week I’ve been putting… It’s written stuff. I feel like where I’m most comfortable putting content in the world as talking, but also writing. That’s where I really feel comfortable, that’s where I kind of started out from. So, I’ve been resharing some of the essays that I’ve written through the years on my Substack at the moment, based on the people who are following it already. I asked a poll, like, what would you want to hear? Which sorts of essays do you want to see? And we’re doing the wives of Henry VIII, which is something I don’t know if I’d ever do on the podcast, but I did a lot of research about them back in the day. And so it’s a series called “Tudor? I Hardly Knew Her!” We’re just kind of going wife by wife through all the wives. A lot of them have more than one part because there’s a lot to say about people like Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, for instance. Anyway, so it’s VulgarHistory.Substack.com. If you’re on there, you can follow along. It’s totally free, and it’s just sort of another branch of the Vulgar History tree, I guess.
You can also support this podcast on Patreon at Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter, where, for $1 a month, you get early, ad-free access to all the episodes, as well as ad-free access to the episodes that have already been on. So, you can hook that up with wherever you listen to your podcast, if it’s on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or whatever, you can get that feed on there. So, you can just always listen to ad-free episodes.
If you pledge at least $5 or more a month, you get access to the bonus episodes of Vulgarpiece Theatre, most recently Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is the movie that we talk about. The next one we’re going to be doing is Brotherhood of the Wolf, but we’ve also done other movies before we’ve done like Ned Kelly, the movie that’s called literally Ned Kelly, starring Heath Ledger, The Woman King, we did Chevalier. And also, if you— Actually okay. So, if you pledge the $5 a month, you get access to all those episodes as well, which again, you can listen to in your regular podcast listening app. You also get access to the Discord, which is the Vulgar History Salon Internationale. I hang out there a lot. And yeah, it’s just a place for Tits Out Brigade to hang out and talk and share pictures of our cats, and I put some spoilers what upcoming episodes. It’s just a group chat, basically. So, to join that Discord, you need to be at that $5 or more a level.
And also, if you just want to listen to the Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure episode of Vulgarpiece Theatre, for instance, or other specific of these Patreon only episodes, I’ve started putting them for sale basically. So, instead of subscribing for $5 a month for $5, you can just buy that episode so you can listen to it. So, that’s all available at Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter.
