The search for Claire Clairmont

The first biography of Claire Clairmont, Claire Clairmont: Mother of Byron’s Allegra, published in 1939, was unsentimental about its subject’s relevance. Clairmont was indeed the mother of Lord Byron’s Allegra, the least notable of his daughters. The poet was also father to the early computing pioneer Ada Lovelace and, allegedly, to a daughter with his half-sister. The charge of incest has never been proven but it is widely enough believed that Byron’s Wikipedia page lists the child as his “presumed” daughter right up top. Of course, that is not necessarily proof either way. Taylor Swift’s Wikipedia cannot be edited without her publicist knowing; the long dead find it harder to control their image. By comparison, the late Claire Clairmont fares very well in the hands of Lesley McDowell, who has written a new novel about her life. Clairmont’s title embodies the premise that its subject is more than just the mother of Byron’s Allegra, the stepsister of Mary Shelley and sister-in-law of Percy Bysshe Shelley. It is positioned as a literary rescue of Clairmont. Jennifer Saint, who has written four such novels about women in Greek mythology, blurbs the book with a commendation: Claire is “a woman who deserves to be remembered”.

Clairmont has not only been remembered. Her memory has survived long enough to meet a moment in publishing when a story like hers has value. Today, a novel about a wilful young woman overcoming the psychosexual oppression of a powerful older man fits comfortably into the profitable intersection of Regency romance and feminist retellings of ancient myths.

In her own time, Clairmont could not interest the publishing industry. On paper it is bizarre that, with all her gifts, connections and advantages, she had no literary career. Highly educated, multilingual and well-travelled, Clairmont enjoyed the close friendship and support of the Shelleys, whose radical politics she shared and championed until late in her life. At 16, she joined Mary and Percy on their European elopement, along the way tinkering with a story she was writing, “The Ideot”. It was to be about an exceptional mind “which by Common people was deemed the mind of an Ideot, because it conformed not to their vulgar and prejudiced views”.

In her journal from the trip, Clairmont disparaged Germans as “begrimed with mental and bodily depravity” and the French as “intolerably full of [themselves]”. As a writer, she might have turned out an early Ayn Rand if she had ever finished anything.

Clairmont was there in 1814 at the Villa Diodati when a challenge from Byron to write a spooky story prompted Mary to produce Frankenstein. But she is not thought to have participated in the literary exercise. She was occupied instead with Byron, with whose child she was by then pregnant.

A year after Allegra Byron’s birth, Byron agreed to a request from Clairmont and the Shelleys to take her into his care. Better, the thinking went, for the child’s prospects and reputation to be raised in the household of the wealthy aristocrat than by her 18-year-old mother and her cash-strapped anarchist relations. By then, Clairmont and Byron had no relationship. Indeed, he despised her.

Letters became Clairmont’s genre by necessity; she honed the craft by begging Byron to provide a future for her and her child. The letters typically went unanswered but the writing was lush, evocative, acid. “You write the most amusing & clever letters in the world,” Mary praised her. “If your letters are ever published, all others that ever were published before, will fall into the shade, & you be [sic] looked on as the best letter writer that ever charmed their friends.” They made little impact on Byron. “Claire writes me the most insolent letters about Allegra . . . you cannot conceive the excess of her insolence,” he complained.

When Allegra turned four, Byron began to find the child an inconvenience, and placed her in a convent, breaking a promise that Allegra would always be in the care of at least one parent.

The convent only took girls from the age of seven; for the privilege of taking Allegra at four, Byron doubled her fees. While there, Allegra’s health deteriorated and she died at the age of five. Clairmont blamed Byron; Byron continued to ignore Clairmont entirely.

As a writer, Clairmont might have turned out an early Ayn Rand if she had ever finished anything

Clairmont’s only success in fiction came in 1832, when she shamelessly sent Mary an unfinished short story, asking that Mary complete it and get it published. “The truth is, I should never think of writing, knowing well my incapacity for it, but I want to gain money,” she wrote to her stepsister. “What would one not do for that, since it is the only key to freedom. One is even impudent enough to ask a great authoress to finish one’s tale for one.” Mary did it, the story is called “The Pole” and its best quality is its vivid remembrance of Naples, where Clairmont had lived. Otherwise, the only remarkable thing about it is that it was credited not to Clairmont but to Mary Shelley on publication.

It is not clear that this bothered Clairmont. She understood it as a financial venture, not a creative one. The thing for Clairmont was to achieve a kind of independence in her life, however it was financed. She achieved practical independence as a globetrotting governess and teacher, supported by a bequeathment from Percy Shelley. After she died, the letters Mary had thought so sensational never excited the literary world as much as the fact that Clairmont had unseen letters from Percy Shelley in her collection.

This is Clairmont’s moment because it is the moment for stories about women that have felt long suppressed. In the past few years the genre has prospered: in 2018, Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls refocused on Briseis after Achilles took her as a sex slave; in 2021, Jennifer Saint continued the story of Ariadne after Theseus abandoned her on Naxos; in 2023, Sandra Newman rewrote 1984 in Julia’s words. It is important work. Retelling and interrogating myths is a tradition that goes back to the ancient Greeks themselves.

It is also fertile ground. In the past two years alone, writers have taken up the stories of Morgan le Fay, Penelope, Elektra, Phaedra, Medea, Hera, Clytemnestra, Atalanta, Alcestis and Psyche. Medusa’s history has been reimagined no fewer than three times. The well of potential candidates for such treatment is deep, but not endlessly so. Perhaps this is why publishers and writers are fracking further afield for real people whose lives might fit the formula. It doesn’t exactly flatter Clairmont that she has come into fashion because of public appetite for stories about Gorgons.

“I would willingly think that my memory may not be lost in oblivion as my life has been,” wrote Clairmont in real life, words quoted in McDowell’s novel. Has it been? McDowell remembers Clairmont over three periods: as a teenager in a bad romance, as a woman of means bedevilled by her past and as a fun aunt. Her Clairmont is, over various episodes, beset by blackmailers, gossipy governesses and fickle young lovers. She is resurrected as a romantic, adventurous and kinky bon vivant. McDowell opts not to represent the sour figure she became in her final years, atheism renounced, wit deserted, mulling a book to warn against the evil ideas of Percy Shelley.

The novel is a gift to Clairmont, if you assume that it is the young Clairmont and not her prudish final form who ought to be remembered. Henry James fictionalised the latter Clairmont in The Aspern Papers as a cold spinster, of interest only as the last guardian of Percy Shelley’s secrets. To that Clairmont, McDowell’s book would be repugnant. Too sensual! It is tuned tight to the sensuality of the body, of complexions and gardens. Lips, earlobes and nipples are nibbled throughout. McDowell has located the most appealing version of Clairmont’s story to contemporary readers: a Gothic romance staged across scenic Italy, Russia and France in which the urbane and amorous heroine, unseen and unheard her whole life, emerges from a series of toxic relationships alone but powerful.

McDowell postulates passionate affairs between Clairmont and two of the men in her life, and an attempted one with Percy that ends prematurely. Byron, here, is a clear villain (not without justification) who, in this telling, schemes to abort Clairmont’s child, drugs and molests her with Percy, and gives confirmation that he is the father of his half-sister’s child. Fictionalisations are necessary to fiction, but there is an inherent oddness to presenting a book as breaking the silence of a forgotten woman while embellishing her life in directions that are almost all sexual or lurid to satisfy the tastes of modern readers.

Working in this mode, we must see, as McDowell provides, Clairmont have the satisfaction of punching Byron in the jaw, and accuse others of “using” her life for their “own story”. (Only in contemporary fiction do human beings worry so much about their “stories”, and feeling part of someone else’s story.)

Natasha Solomons, who has written historical novels rescuing Mona Lisa and Romeo and Juliet’s Rosaline from the margins, told The Guardian that this kind of work is part of a literary tradition. “This is what we do, we tell stories again and again and we change them according to our needs.”

That is the unsentimental truth: we change stories according to our needs. James took his version of Clairmont for his needs, McDowell took hers for her own. Clairmont has been marginalised in favour of characters history likes better, and embellished to appeal to readers she otherwise would not. She witnessed the former, would she have appreciated the latter? Well, who cares!

McDowell dedicated her book to “every Claire Clairmont who fears her story will be forgotten”. Whether that means readers who feel unheard and unseen in their lives, or simply worry that they will not one day be the subject of a novel, it isn’t clear, but in any case it does not matter what they fear or feel. In fact, their stories, like everyone’s, will be forgotten or remembered according to the needs of others. Everything we are is ultimately all just material. Our stories belong to whoever wants to take them.

Follow @FTMag to find out about our latest stories first and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen