Interview with “Clairmont” Author Lesley McDowell
In our “Romanticism Beyond the Academy” series, we invite literature-lovers to reflect on the significance of Romantic-era writers and ideas in the contemporary world, in popular culture, and/or in their own lives. In this post, we interview Dr. Lesley McDowell on her recent novel Clairmont (Wildfire 2024) based on the life of Mary Shelley’s stepsister Claire Clairmont. The novel will be released in the U.S on September 10, 2024.
1. Claire Clairmont is largely known as the stepsister who formed an awkward third in Mary Shelley’s travels with Percy, and who eventually became entangled with Lord Byron. But as your novel shows, there’s so much more to her. What particularly captivated you about Clare and her story? Why did you want to write about her?
Back in 1998, I was asked to review a story for children byMary Shelley that was written in 1820 and that had only recently been discovered. The introduction was by Claire Tomalin, a well-known biographer, and, as it was a book for children, she focused on the children in the lives of the Shelleys and their circle. That included Allegra, the child of Claire Clairmont and Lord Byron.
I remembered Claire from studying Byron, Shelley, and Mary’s novel, Frankenstein, when I was an Eng Lit student, and that she’d had a child by Byron. But I’d assumed she’d just died or something after that happened, probably because we’re so used to narratives about fallen women from that era who fall and don’t get back up again! So to read Tomalin describe her working as a governess in Russia, and living independently in Paris, just amazed me and made me want to read more about her life. A biography of Claire had been published just a few years before, so that was my first stop, then I started looking for the letters and diaries she left behind.
What I loved about her from the start was her zest for life. She was treated horribly by Byron – and even by Shelley. But she adhered to her heroine, Mary Wollstonecraft’s, principles about a woman earning for herself, and was determined to do that, no matter what. She was the great survivor – she’s the basis for Henry James’s novella The Aspern Papers, which fictionalises the visit of Edward Silsbee, the American collector, to Claire’s Florentine apartment in the 1870s, and the merry dance she led him in her old age.
I think I felt that her story was told by so many other people, that her only chance to tell it herself was in her letters and diaries. But so few people had access to those, and there had only been two biographies about her. So I started trying to tell her story in her own ‘voice’, in a fictional form that would reach more people. I really wanted people to know that she was more than Byron’s mistress, or Mary’s stepsister. She wasn’t just a witness to literary genius; she was at the heart of it.
2. A snippet of Clairmont’s journal entry that I’ve once come across helped me (Shellie) see her emotional maturity and talent as a writer beyond what (I think) is normally captured in brief biographical sketches and other adaptations. Is there something essential in your representation of Clare Clairmont which you think has been much overlooked in other popular portrayals of her in e.g. Mary Shelley (2017, Haifaa al-Mansour & Emma Jensen) or Gothic (1986, Ken Russell)? Or, what would you most like your reader to see about this neglected figure?
Popular portrayals of Claire vary widely – Ken Russell’s film, Gothic, shows her almost incapable of rationality, an escaped lunatic of a woman who ends up literally speechless. He might have been commenting on how she’d been silenced over the years but I don’t think it was a sympathetic portrayal. In the 2017 film Mary Shelley, she’s treated with more accuracy, but she’s still very much a lesser figure in the Byron-Shelley circle, and there’s nothing about the kind of life she had after her affair with Byron. There’s no escaping the impact that Byron had on her life, or that the summer of 1816 when they all lived close together in Geneva, Byron in the grand Villa Diodati and the Shelleys and Claire in a cottage by the lake, set her on a particular course. She said herself that her ‘ten minutes of happy passion’ had discombobulated the rest of her life.
But I don’t think she spent the rest of her life trying to escape from that moment, or trying to atone for it in some way. Even if she had never met Byron, or been a stepsister to Mary, her decision to live independently is so far from our expectations of women’s lives of that time, that she would be remarkable for that alone. Most importantly though, I also see her as a real counter to the Jane Austen heroine that we all embrace so readily, the wonderful Elizabeth Bennet types who make a ‘good’ marriage with a wealthy man who nevertheless respects them, and who is presented to us as ideal. Claire eschewed marriage entirely, even though she received many proposals, but that didn’t mean she never loved, or experienced sexual desire, or acted on it. She’s a breath of fresh air in that respect, but she’s also an example from history that we rarely hear about – a Regency-era woman who financially supported herself, had lovers, and never married. She’s closer to modern women today than, say, her step-sister, or the heroines of Austen’s novels.
3. Could you tell us a bit about your process of researching Claire Clairmont and understanding her relationships with others in her circle? What sources or archives were particularly helpful? Are there any interesting tidbits you would like to share with our readers?
I started my research with the two biographies we have of Claire (one from 1992, by Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, and one from 1939 by Rosalie Glynn Grylls). I also read as many biographies of Byron, Shelley and Mary Shelley, as I could. When I first started researching, her letters had just been published in two volumes, collected by Marion Kingston Stocking, so I purchased those, but the journals weren’t collected into a volume I could buy. They could be borrowed through a university library though, as they’re held in the Pforzheimer collection in the New York Public Library, so I was able to read them (I now own a volume of them as they’ve since been printed). That all took time, of course, and I hadn’t written fiction when I first thought of writing a novel about her. I had been an academic, working on feminist theory and the work of James Joyce, then became a literary critic, so it took me some time to learn the craft of novel-writing. When I first tried to write about her, I couldn’t do it. I had too much information about her – as much as the diaries and letters and biographies helped me get a sense of her personality, I couldn’t see the ‘gaps’ that you need as a novelist, the spaces where your imagination can grow. So I swerved and wrote about a Scottish childhood friend of Mary Shelley’s instead, a woman called Isabella Baxter Booth, about whom a lot less has been written. We hardly have anything of Isabella’s voice, so I was able to imagine it for myself.
After that, I understood better what a ‘story’ needed, and kept thinking about how to write about Claire. I’d learned that I needed to always keep in mind how things appeared from her perspective, not the perspective of others. So, for example, when she’s at the Villa Diodati on the famous night when Byron challenges them all to write a ghost story (and which is the moment credited with inspiriting Mary’s literary creation, Frankenstein), I had to keep reminding myself that Claire is pregnant at this moment, and nobody else knows it. She has a secret that’s enormous, and none of them have a clue about it. That night at the Villa Diodati is never shown from Claire’s point of view – she’s only ever a witness, as I said, to the others’ literary genius. But she’s ‘creating’ at that very moment, and it really made me wonder what might have been going through her mind at this time. She threw away her journals form this summer, and Mary threw away most of hers, too, so we don’t have the written perspective of the two women who were part of this group, in their own words at the moment it’s all happening.
The fact that this is so often the case for history’s marginalized figures is very frustrating, but it’s also where fiction can enter the conversation: it allows the writer to imaginatively fill in the gaps, not just by fabricating events but by developing a character’s inner world and elaborating on what they might have been thinking or feeling. Both what we know of Clare Claremont and what we don’t know make her an appealing subject for fiction.
Lesley McDowell is an author and critic living in Scotland. She earned a PhD for work on James Joyce and feminist theory before turning to literary journalism. She reviews regularly for the Herald, the Scotsman and the Independent on Sunday is the author of Between the Sheets: The Literary Liaisons of Nine 20th Century Women Writers (Overlook, 2010), The Picnic (Black and White, 2007), Unfashioned Creatures (Saraband, 2013), and most recently Clairmont.
