Interview with “Clairmont” Author Lesley McDowell —Part 2
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. In the first part of the interview, you spoke about why you wanted to write about Clare Claremont, how your representation differs from others, and how you went about researching her life.
Could you tell us a bit about the creative aspect of your writing process? What kind of artistic license did you take with Clare’s story? What gaps did you fill in, and how so?
The trickiest part of writing about real people is always what to change. I work as an editorial consultant and it’s always the same issue that crops up for clients wanting to fictionalise historical figures: how do you know what to leave out, and how much can you change? My answer is always that you can change whatever you want, but what you do change might alter the kind of book you’re writing. For instance, if you want to write a novel where Claire marries Byron after giving birth to his daughter and they live happily ever after, you can do that, but it would be historical fantasy (probably ‘romantasy’ now) rather than historical or biographical fiction. So you have to stick to the truth of the main events, like dates of birth and death, and so on, if you’re writing biographical fiction.
At the same time, though, you can’t allow your story to be completely directed and controlled by those events. So although my novel gives the most importance to the 1816 summer in Geneva and what happened there, I’m free to write what I think Claire might have experienced then because there’s so little record from the actual time of what she was thinking and feeling, in her own words. And that thinking and feeling takes the story in a different direction from the one you might expect from the ‘history’ of that summer, or the biographies’ versions of it.
The same goes for her time in Russia and in Paris. Although there are letters and diary entries from those years, which can help give a shape to what occurs in the novel, it’s crucial that we see Claire’s inner life explored in a way that she doesn’t do, even in her most intimate records. For example, we don’t know the identity of her lover in Paris – or even if she definitely had a lover, because there’s a difference of interpretation of words from a letter she wrote to Mary in 1844. Her biographers, Gittings and Manton, transcribe ‘I saw you know’ from the letter, and assume Claire means ‘you know’ is reference to a lover (this is backed by Claire writing to Mary a couple of years earlier that ‘one is often obliged to conceal one’s affairs or feelings from the person one would most like to disclose them to. More I cannot say, but I am sure your intuition will guess my meaning and e glad that I am happy’). But Marion Kingston Stocking transcribes it as ‘I saw Knox’, who is a friend of Mary’s son Percy, who was living in Paris then.
There are no journal entries from these years, so I’m free to imagine what Claire might have meant by these words. It’s one of the instances where I take things further and give an identity to the lover I believe Claire had at this time. It also provides a link to the blazing row she had with Mary at Field Place in 1849, something that has long astonished biographers and for which they have never been able to provide a reason. But a novelist can!
2. Not to make it all about Byron and the Shelleys—but does your rendering of Clare within this circle challenge any commonly held beliefs about them and/or that famous “volcanic” summer of 1816?
Since the novel has come out in the UK, it’s surprised a lot of readers just how viciously Byron behaved towards Claire, and that in turn has surprised me. 2024 is the bicentenary of Byron’s death, and for many, he wasn’t just a hero who went to fight for Greek independence (he’s considered a hero to Greeks, to this day), but he’s a great poet, one of the greatest in the English language. He’s the epitome of the romantic poet, exiled by his home country and punished for not conforming. He’s also handsome and rich and aristocratic, and he died young. On the surface, he’s every inch of the kind of idol we still find attractive today, though that figure’s represented more in music, say, or film.
So many of Byron’s followers know little about Claire at all, mainly because she’s a real stain on his character. He can be forgiven, it seems, for his behaviour towards nameless women he might encounter, like the maidservant he ‘falls upon’ when he arrives at his first lodgings abroad in 1816 (according to his doctor, John Polidori). They’re easily dismissed – as are past lovers like Lady Caroline Lamb, who famously described him as ‘Mad, bad, and dangerous to know’. And even his estrangement from his wife, Annabella Millbanke, is excused – indeed, she is often blamed for ‘hounding’ him out of England, causing his permanent exile, and not his affair with his half-sister, Augusta.
But it’s harder to forgive him for what he did to Claire, how he ignored her requests to be allowed to see her own child, who he kept from her, and who died alone in a convent at the age of five. It’s easier for Byron fans to ignore Claire altogether, or gloss over the death of his child by her as just another sad event in a life full of tragic glamour. Some Byron biographers even blame Claire for Allegra’s death, arguing that Byron only put their child in a convent because Claire was annoying him so much with persistent requests to see her child.
3. Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know? Or, do you have any similar projects on the horizon?
So, part of what I wanted to do with the novel was re-set that part of the story. To show Byron through Claire’s eyes and hold his crime up to the light for everyone to see. And I wanted to show how Claire coped with her loss, and how it changed her, too. This might be the year of Byron celebrations, but it’s also the prefect time for Claire to tell her story, not just about him and what he did to her, but about how she triumphed over it.
And I say ‘triumphed’, because I think that she did, in spite of how difficult her life often was. She held on to her principles, and she lived and loved on her own terms, which is something we say too easily today, but two hundred years ago meant struggle and pain, as well as freedom to choose.
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.
