Clara Mary Jane Clairmont (27 April 1798 – 19 March 1879), or Claire Clairmont as she was commonly known, was the stepsister of the 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 Cadiz".
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. 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".