Claire Clairmont - Byron

Byron

At sixteen, Clairmont was a lively, voluptuous 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 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 couldn't make the girl 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, into Switzerland, fancying themselves like 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 is is true – Real Love will never 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 called "The Idiot," which has since been lost. In 1817-1818, she wrote a book which Percy Bysshe Shelley tried without success to have published. But though Claire lacked the literary talent of her stepsister and brother-in-law, she always longed to take center stage. It was during this period that she changed her name from "Jane" to first "Clara" and finally the more romantic-sounding "Claire."

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. Clairmont had hopes of becoming a writer or an actress and wrote to Byron asking for "career advice" in March 1816, when she was almost eighteen. Byron was a director at the Drury Lane Theatre. Clairmont later followed up her letters with visits, sometimes with her stepsister Mary Godwin, 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 communiques" telling him he need only accept "that which it has long been the passionate wish of my heart to give you". She arranged for them to meet at a country inn. Byron, in a depressed state after the break-up of his marriage to Annabella Milbanke and 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. Clairmont, on the other hand, was determined she would change his mind. She convinced Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, that they should follow Byron to Switzerland, where they met him and John William Polidori (Byron's personal physician) at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva. It is unknown whether or not Clairmont knew she was pregnant with Byron's child at the commencement of the trip, but it soon became apparent to both her traveling companions and to Byron not long after their arrival at his door. At first he maintained his refusal of Clairmont's companionship and only allowed her to be in his presence in the company of the Shelleys; later, they resumed their sexual relationship for a time in Switzerland. Clairmont and Mary Shelley also made fair copies of Byron's work-in-progress, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which he was in the process of writing.

Clairmont was the only lover, other than Caroline Lamb, whom Byron referred to as a "little fiend." Confessing the affair in a letter to his half-sister Augusta Leigh, Byron wrote

What could I do? -- a foolish girl -- in spite of all I could say or do -- would come after me -- or rather went before me -- for I found her here ... I could not exactly play the Stoic with a woman -- who had scrambled eight hundred miles to unphilosophize me."

He referred to her also in the following manner, in a letter to Douglas Kinnaird (20 January 1817):

" You know--& I believe saw once that odd-headed girl—who introduced herself to me shortly before I left England—but you do not know—that I found her with Shelley and her sister at Geneva—I never loved her nor pretended to love her—but a man is a man--& if a girl of eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours of the night—there is but one way—the suite of all this is that she was with child--& returned to England to assist in peopling that desolate island...This comes of "putting it about" (as Jackson calls it) & be dammed to it—and thus people come into the world."

Clairmont was to say later that her relationship with Byron had given her only a few minutes of pleasure, but a lifetime of trouble.