Clara Mary Jane Clairmont (27 April 1798 – 19 March 1879), commonly known as Claire Clairmont, was the stepsister of English writer Mary Shelley and the mother of Lord Byron's daughter Allegra. She is thought to be the subject of a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Early life Clairmont was born in 1798 in Brislington, near Bristol, England, the second child and only daughter of Mary Jane Vial Clairmont. Throughout her childhood, she was known as Jane. In 2010 the identity of her father was discovered to be John Lethbridge (1746–1815, after 1804 Sir John Lethbridge, 1st Baronet) of Sandhill Park, near Taunton in Somerset. Her mother had identified him as a "Charles Clairmont", adopting the name Clairmont for herself and her children to disguise their illegitimacy. It appears that the father of her first child, Charles, was Charles Abram Marc Gaulis, "a merchant and member of a prominent Swiss family, whom she met in Cádiz".
In December 1801, when Clairmont was three years old, her mother married a neighbour, the writer and philosopher William Godwin. This brought her two stepsisters: Godwin's daughter, later Mary Shelley, only eight months her senior, and his stepdaughter Fanny Imlay, a couple of years older. Both were the daughters of Mary Wollstonecraft, who had died four years before, but whose presence continued to be felt in the household. The new couple soon became the parents of a son, which completed the family.
All five children were influenced by Godwin's radical anarchist philosophical beliefs. Both parents were well-educated and they co-wrote children's primers on Biblical and classical history, and ran a bookshop and publishers known as the Juvenile Library. Godwin encouraged all of his children to read widely and give lectures from early childhood.
Mary Jane Clairmont was a sharp-tongued woman, who often quarrelled with Godwin and favoured her own children over her husband's. She contrived to send her volatile and emotionally intense daughter to boarding school for a time, so providing her with more formal education than her stepsisters. Unlike Mary, Claire Clairmont was fluent in French as a teenager and was later credited with fluency in five languages. Despite their different treatment, the girls grew close and remained in contact for the rest of their lives.
Travels through Europe with the Shelleys At 16, Clairmont was a lively brunette with a good singing voice and a hunger for recognition. Her home life had become increasingly tense as her stepfather William Godwin sank deeper into debt and her mother's relations with Godwin's daughter Mary became more strained. Clairmont aided her stepsister's clandestine meetings with Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had professed a belief in free love and soon left his own wife, Harriet, and two small children to be with Mary. When Mary ran away with Shelley in July 1814, Clairmont went with them. Clairmont's mother traced the group to an inn in Calais, but could not make Clairmont go home with her. Godwin needed the financial assistance that the aristocratic Shelley could provide.
Clairmont remained in the Shelley household in their wanderings across Europe. The three young people traipsed across war-torn France and into Switzerland, fancying themselves as characters in a romantic novel, as Mary Shelley later recalled, but always reading widely, writing, and discussing the creative process. On the journey, Clairmont read Rousseau, Shakespeare and the works of Mary's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. "What shall poor Cordelia do – Love & be silent", Clairmont wrote in her journal while reading King Lear. "Oh [th]is is true – Real Love will never [sh]ew itself to the eye of broad day – it courts the secret glades." Clairmont's emotions were so stirred by Cordelia that she had one of her "horrors", a hysterical fit, Mary Shelley recorded in her own journal entry for the same day. Clairmont, who was surrounded by poets and writers, also made her own literary attempts. During the summer of 1814, she started a story titled The Idiot, which has since been lost. In 1817–1818, she wrote a book, which Percy Bysshe Shelley tried without success to have published.Booth, pp. 67–70. Although Clairmont lacked the literary talent of her stepsister and brother-in-law, she always longed to take centre stage. It was during this period that she changed her name from "Jane", first to "Clara" and finally to the more romantic-sounding "Claire".
Relationship with Lord Byron
Any romantic designs Clairmont might have had on Shelley were frustrated initially, but she did bring the Shelleys into contact with Lord Byron, with whom she entered into an affair before he left England in 1816 to live abroad. (A year marked by agricultural failures and widespread European famine, but also of significant literary advances as the Godwin-Shelley-Byron circle holed up indoors, 1816 would later be known as the "year without a summer".) Clairmont hoped to become a writer or an actress and wrote to Byron asking for "career advice" in March 1816, when she was almost 18. Byron was a director at the Drury Lane Theatre. Clairmont later followed up her letters with visits, sometimes bringing Mary, whom she seemed to suggest Byron might also find attractive. "Do you know I cannot talk to you when I see you? I am so awkward and only feel inclined to take a little stool and sit at your feet", Clairmont wrote to Byron. She "bombarded him with passionate daily communiqués", telling him he need only accept "that which it has long been the passionate wish of my heart to give you."Eisler, p. 504. She arranged for them to meet at a country inn. Byron, in a depressed state after the breakup of his marriage to Annabella Milbanke and the scandal over his relationship with his half-sister Augusta Leigh, made it very clear to Clairmont before he left that she would not be a part of his life, but she remained determined to change his mind.
She convinced Mary and Percy Shelley that they should follow Byron to Switzerland, where they met him and his personal physician, John William Polidori, at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva. It is unknown whether Clairmont knew she was pregnant with Byron's child at the commencement of the trip, but it soon became apparent to both her travelling companions and to Byron not long after their arrival at his door. At first he maintained his refusal of Clairmont's companionship and allowed her to be in his presence only in the company of the Shelleys; later, they resumed their sexual relationship for a time in Switzerland. Clairmont and Mary also made fair copies of Byron's current work-in-progress, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.Eisler, p. 519.
Clairmont was the only lover, other than Caroline Lamb, whom Byron referred to as a "little fiend".Eisler, p. 515. Confessing the affair in a letter to his half-sister Augusta Leigh, Byron wrote:
He referred to her also in a letter to Douglas Kinnaird (20 January 1817):
Clairmont would later say that her relationship with Byron had given her only a few minutes of pleasure, but a lifetime of trouble.
Allegra The group left Byron in Switzerland at the end of the summer and returned to England. Clairmont took up residence in Bath and in January 1817 she gave birth to a daughter, Alba, whose name was eventually changed to Allegra. Throughout the pregnancy, Clairmont had written long letters to Byron, pleading for his attention and a promise to care for her and the baby, sometimes making fun of his friends, reminding him how much he had enjoyed having sex with her, and sometimes threatening suicide. Byron, who by this time hated her, ignored the letters. The following year, Clairmont and the Shelleys left England and journeyed once more to Byron, who now resided in Italy. Clairmont felt that the future Byron could provide for their daughter would be greater than any she herself would be able to grant the child and therefore, wished to deliver Allegra into his care.
Upon arriving in Italy, Clairmont was again refused by Byron. He arranged to have Allegra delivered to his house in Venice and agreed to raise the child on the condition that Clairmont keep her distance from him. Clairmont reluctantly gave Allegra over to Byron.
Clairmont was granted only a few brief visits with her daughter after surrendering her to Byron. When Byron arranged to place her in a Capuchin convent in Bagnacavallo, Italy, Clairmont was outraged. In 1821, she wrote Byron a letter accusing him of breaking his promise that their daughter would never be apart from one of her parents. She felt that the physical conditions in convents were unhealthy and the education provided was poor and was responsible for "the state of ignorance & profligacy of Italian women, all pupils of Convents. They are bad wives & most unnatural mothers, licentious & ignorant they are the dishonour & unhappiness of society.... This step will procure to you an innumerable addition of enemies & of blame."Eisler, pp. 690–691.
By March 1822, it had been two years since she had seen her daughter. She plotted to kidnap Allegra from the convent and asked Shelley to forge a letter of permission from Byron. Shelley refused her request. Byron's seemingly callous treatment of the child was further vilified when Allegra died there at the age of five, from a fever some scholars identify as typhus and others speculate was a malarial-type fever. Clairmont held Byron entirely responsible for the loss of their daughter and hated him for the rest of her life. Shelley's death followed only two months later.
Relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley
Clairmont may have been sexually involved with Percy Bysshe Shelley at various periods,Eisler, p. 516. though Clairmont's biographers, Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, find no hard evidence. Their friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg joked about "Shelley and his two wives", Mary and Claire, a remark that Clairmont recorded in her own journal. Clairmont was also entirely in sympathy, more so than Mary, with Shelley's theories about free love, communal living, and the right of a woman to choose her own lovers and initiate sexual contact outside marriage. She seemed to conceive of love as a "triangle" and enjoyed being the third. She had also formed a close friendship with Shelley, who called her "my sweet child", and she both inspired and fed off his work.
Mary Shelley's early journals record several times when Clairmont and Shelley shared visions of Gothic horror and let their imaginings take flight, stirring each other's emotions to the point of hysteria and nightmares.Fisch, Mellor, and Schor, p. 45. In October 1814, Shelley deliberately frightened Clairmont by assuming a particularly sinister and horrifying facial expression. "How horribly you look... Take your eyes off!" she cried. She was put to bed after yet another of her "horrors". Shelley described her expression to Mary as "distorted most unnaturally by horrible dismay". In the autumn of 1814, Clairmont and Shelley also discussed forming "an association of philosophical people" and Clairmont's conception of an idealized community in which women were the ones in charge.
Shelley's poem "To Constantia, Singing" is thought to be about her:
Mary Shelley revised this poem, completely altering the first two stanzas, when she included it in a posthumous collection of Shelley's works published in 1824. In Shelley's "Epipsychidion", some scholars believe that he is addressing Clairmont as his:Eisler, p. 519.
At the time Shelley wrote the poem, in Pisa, Clairmont was living in Florence, and the lines may reveal how much he missed her.Gittings and Manton, p. 58.