48 Facts About Claire Clairmont

Claire Clairmont is thought to be the subject of a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Claire Clairmont's mother had identified him as a "Charles Clairmont", adopting the name Clairmont for herself and her children to disguise their illegitimacy.

In December 1801, when Claire Clairmont was three years old, her mother married a neighbour, the writer and philosopher William Godwin.

Mary Jane Claire Clairmont was a sharp-tongued woman, who often quarrelled with Godwin and favoured her own children over her husband's.

Unlike Mary, Claire Clairmont was fluent in French as a teenager and was later credited with fluency in five languages.

At 16, Claire Clairmont was a lively brunette with a good singing voice and a hunger for recognition.

Claire 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, Claire Clairmont went with them.

Claire Clairmont's mother traced the group to an inn in Calais, but could not make Claire Clairmont go home with her.

Claire Clairmont remained in the Shelley household in their wanderings across Europe.

Claire Clairmont, who was surrounded by poets and writers, made her own literary attempts.

Any romantic designs Claire 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.

Claire Clairmont later followed up her letters with visits, sometimes bringing Mary, whom she seemed to suggest Byron might find attractive.

Claire Clairmont 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.

Claire Clairmont was the only lover, other than Caroline Lamb, whom Byron referred to as a "little fiend".

Claire Clairmont referred to her in a letter to Douglas Kinnaird :.

Claire Clairmont took up residence in Bath and in January 1817 she gave birth to a daughter, Alba, whose name was eventually changed to Allegra.

Claire 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.

Claire Clairmont 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.

Claire Clairmont was granted only a few brief visits with her daughter after surrendering her to Byron.

Claire Clairmont plotted to kidnap Allegra from the convent and asked Shelley to forge a letter of permission from Byron.

Claire Clairmont held Byron entirely responsible for the loss of their daughter and hated him for the rest of her life.

Claire Clairmont seemed to conceive of love as a "triangle" and enjoyed being the third.

Claire Clairmont had formed a close friendship with Shelley, who called her "my sweet child", and she both inspired and fed off his work.

In October 1814, Shelley deliberately frightened Claire Clairmont by assuming a particularly sinister and horrifying facial expression.

Claire Clairmont was put to bed after yet another of her "horrors".

The possibility goes back to the accusation by Shelley's servants, Elise and Paolo Foggi, that Claire Clairmont gave birth to Shelley's baby during a stay in Naples, where on 27 February 1819, Shelley registered a baby named Elena Adelaide Shelley as having been born on 27 December 1818.

Claire Clairmont herself had ascended Mount Vesuvius, carried on a palanquin, on 16 December 1818, only nine days before the date given for the birth of Elena.

Shortly after Claire Clairmont had introduced Shelley to Byron, she met Edward John Trelawny, who was to play a major role in the short remaining lives of both poets.

Claire Clairmont paid for Clairmont to travel to her brother's home in Vienna where she stayed for a year, before relocating to Russia, where she worked as a governess from 1825 to 1828, firstly in St Petersburg and then in Moscow.

Still, what Claire Clairmont longed for most of all was privacy and peace and quiet, as she complained in letters to Mary Shelley.

Claire Clairmont returned to England in 1828, but remained there only a short while before departing for Dresden, where she was employed as a companion and housekeeper.

Unlike Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont was familiar with the Polish used in the story.

Claire Clairmont did not make many literary attempts, as she explained to her friend Jane Williams:.

In 1836, the year William Godwin died, Claire Clairmont returned to England, where she worked as a music teacher.

Claire Clairmont cared for her mother when she was dying.

In 1841, after Mary Jane Godwin's death, Claire Clairmont moved to Pisa, where she lived with Margaret King, an old pupil of Mary Wollstonecraft.

Claire Clairmont lived in Paris for a time in the 1840s, where she attended Harriet de Boinville's social gatherings, crowded with republicans and Italian revolutionaries.

Claire Clairmont carried on a sometimes turbulent, bitter correspondence with her stepsister, until Mary died in 1851.

Claire Clairmont converted to Catholicism, despite having hated the religion earlier in her life.

Claire Clairmont moved to Florence in 1870 and lived there in an expatriate colony with her niece, Paulina.

Claire Clairmont was close to Paulina's brother Wilhelm Gaulis Clairmont, the only other surviving child of her brother Charles.

Claire Clairmont died in Florence on 19 March 1879, at the age of 80 having outlived all the members of Shelley's circle except Trelawny and Jane Williams.

The 1816 trip to Switzerland during the Year Without a Summer, during which Claire Clairmont aimed to reunite with Byron, and Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein, is the focus of multiple modern re-tellings in several mediums.

Claire Clairmont was portrayed by Myriam Cyr in the 1986 Ken Russell film Gothic, by Elizabeth Hurley in the Goya Award-winning 1988 Spanish film Rowing with the Wind, and by Laura Dern in Haunted Summer.

Thirty years later, Claire Clairmont was played by Bel Powley in Mary Shelley and by Nadia Parkes in the Doctor Who episode "The Haunting of Villa Diodati",.

Claire Clairmont was depicted in a special edition of the comic book The Wicked + The Divine, as an incarnation of the goddess Inanna and a member of the 1830s Pantheon.

Claire Clairmont is referred to in a disparaging manner by Jonathan Strange in the novel "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell" while he is describing his relationship with Lord Byron in letters home.