Lesley McDowell on Mary Shelley’s rebel step sister Claire Clairmont: 'She’s such a transgressive figure'

All this is well known in the history of literature. But there is another woman at the villa, one who has been relegated to the margins of that history: 18-year-old Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley’s step sister, hot-headed, vivacious, and determined to make the most famous poet in the world fall in love with her.

“In the handful of novels where Claire has appeared, she’s always either a witness to genius or she’s just a very one-dimensional nymphomaniac-type on the sidelines,” says Glasgow-based writer Lesley McDowell. Her novel, Clairmont, published by Wildfire in February and out in paperback later this month, puts Claire’s fascinating story into the centre for the first time.

McDowell had heard Claire’s name when she was studying the Romantics, but she knew no more. “At the back of my mind I knew she’d had a baby by Byron, but I just thought she’d died afterwards, one of those cases of a woman used, cast aside, died in a ditch somewhere.”

All that changed when she came across Claire again an essay by literary biographer Claire Tomalin. While the events of the summer of 1816 undoubtedly overshadowed the rest of her life, Claire Clairmont went on to work as a governess in Russia, and to live independently in Paris. She died in 1879 in Florence just shy of her 81st birthday, leaving an extensive body of diaries and letters. But there were also gaps in her story, spaces for a novelist to work.

“She’s such a transgressive figure,” McDowell says. “For a woman at that time to disobey sexual convention was a huge thing. I think we underestimate now what a big, big deal that was. Claire was, in lots of ways, quite a modern woman because she wanted to earn her own living and not be married. I just thought she was wonderful, I was really entranced by her.”

Looking again at the events at the Villa Diodati through Claire’s eyes, she realised they looked quite different from the more coventional version. “They’re great for gossip, Byron and the Shelleys, there’s just so much going on, on a soap opera level,” she says. “But I had to think about these characters in terms of how Claire thinks about them, how they behave towards her, and how they behaved towards her was appalling.”

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It has to be said that neither of the two giants of romantic poetry acquit themselves well in this story. The 28-year-old Byron, “the first great literary celebrity”, is capricious, cruel, beautiful, fabulously rich, an 18th-century rock star. Shelley is complex, manipulative, using Claire to ensnare Byron’s attention for his own reasons. The Villa Diodati was no place for a naieve young woman.

McDowell says: “It’s easy to forget how forget how young the women were. Claire was 18, Mary not much older. Byron’s 10 years older than Claire and, in terms of experience, decades older, she knows absolutely nothing.

“When I started thinking about the story, Byron was the villain, but in the years since, my attitude changed and now I see Shelley as being more of a threat because I think he was very manipulative and very needy. There were two women who killed themselves connected with him, Harriet, his first wife, and Fanny Imlay, Mary’s half-sister. He was dangerous.”

Having studied - and loved - Shelley’s work, she found Claire’s story cast a new light on her literary hero. “I still think he’s the greatest poet England ever produced - and I do mean England - I think he’s extraordinary, a genius, but with that comes a lot of harm. I think we tend to romanticise particularly male genius, and we don’t really accept how damaging it is for those caught up in it, particularly women who don’t have any power.”

When Claire arrives at Lake Geneva, she is already pregnant with Byron’s child. It’s no surprise that she fails to tame the great lothario, but it doesn’t stop there. He insists that her baby daughter, Allegra, is taken from her and placed in the hands of guardians. He refuses all of Claire’s many desperate please to see her.

Claire then has to keep this loss a secret in order to maintain the reputation of a respectable woman which she needs to find work as a governess - the only job open to her if she wants to live independently. Looking with 21st-century eyes, she is a woman caught on a horrible collision course of bad male behaviour and the constraints of her society.

“It’s hard because you don’t want to just automatically map a 21st-century attitude on to a historical situation,” McDowell says. “It’s a question of how do we understand that, how do we collapse that distance between their behaviour then and what we expect or what we value now. I do think it’s what historical novelists have to do, to make it close, to make people feel it.”

McDowell’s previous novel, Unfashioned Creatures, about Mary Shelley’s childhood friend Isabella Baxter, took place in a similar period but in much less well known territory. In this book, she’s dealing with literary giants head on, and with events which are, to a greater or lesser extent, already famous.

“It’s about trying to work with things that you can’t alter, balanced against the needs of the novel, because the novel might need you to do something different. People always say, ‘Listen to my family story, it would make a great novel’. Actually, it probably wouldn’t, it would probably make a good biography or a good memoir, but a novel is different and it has different demands.

“But why would you not want to write about Geneva in 1816 and all of that stuff going on? It’s just fabulous, they’re all poets, it’s all creative. I didn’t want it to stop.” She chuckles. “I think I just like gossip!”

Lesley McDowell and Sara Sheridan: Secrets and Scandal of the 1800s is at Edinburgh International Book Festival, Saturday 10th August, 5.45pm. Clairmont, published by Wildfire, is out in paperback later this month.