Claire Clairmont

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Clara Mary Jane Clairmont , better known as Claire Clairmont (* 27. April 1798 in England ; † 19th March 1879 in Florence ) was a British educator , writer for travel literature and the mistress of the famous poet Lord Byron .

Life

family tree

Clara Mary Jane Clairmont was the illegitimate daughter of Mary Jane Vial and a certain Charles Clairmont . Mary Jane Vial already had an older, also illegitimate, child. To avoid social ostracism, she pretended to be a widow. She earned her living with translations from French. In December 1801, Mary Jane Clairmont married the widowed philosopher and poet William Godwin (1756-1836). The two stepsisters she grew up with were Fanny Imlay , the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and the US speculator Gilbert Imlay , and Mary Godwin , the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. The marriage between William Godwin and Mary Jane Clairmont was met with incomprehension among his friends. Mary Jane Clairmont was considered vulgar and dishonest. Two years later, their son, William junior (1803-1832), was born. The family lived in difficult and poor circumstances. William Godwin was constantly over-indebted, as the income from the sale of his books was not enough to support the now 7-member family.

In 1812, the writer Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) took up letters from William Godwin, whom he admired. In 1814 he probably met Mary Godwin for the first time in William Godwin's house. Although married and has a young daughter, the eccentric and erratic Percy Shelley fell in love with Mary Godwin. William Godwin had condemned marriage as a nonsensical monopoly in his main philosophical work "An Inquiry concerning Political Justice" (1792). In the meantime, however, he had largely broken away from these radical views. On Percy Shelley's admission that there was a violent love affair between Mary Godwin and him, William Godwin reacted violently. He tried to break the relationship; Claire Clairmont was, among other things, the one who delivered letters between the two. On July 28, 1814, Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin escaped to Europe; Mary's stepsister Claire accompanied her. From Paris it went via Switzerland to Germany . They soon decided to return to London due to financial difficulties. Upon their return, William Godwin refused to contact his two daughters. They lived in different apartments alternately in London and on the coast and repeatedly had financial difficulties. The sisters spent a lot of time reading the great works of Goethe , Voltaire , Rousseau , Shakespeare , but also the books by William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Claire Clairmont tried her hand as a playwright and gained access to Byron through a trick. The two of them had a love affair in which Claire Clairmont became pregnant shortly before the relationship ended.

The death of Sir Bysshe Shelley, Shelley's grandfather, in early 1816 eased the trio's tense financial situation somewhat. Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley actually wanted to settle in Italy. Claire Clairmont persuaded her to travel to Lake Geneva first . She knew Lord Byron was going to the same destination and was hoping to revive the relationship there. Mary, Percy and Claire spent May 1816 with Lord Byron and his personal physician Giovanni Polidori on Lake Geneva, where those famous gatherings took place in Byron's Villa Diodati (see the film Gothic , 1987 by Ken Russell ), where the friends share stories of supernatural Narrated events.

Claire gave birth to a daughter in Bath on January 13, 1817 , who was initially named Alba . In the spring of 1818, Claire traveled a third time to the continent, to Italy, to look for Lord Byron. She found this in Venice , where he led a lavish life with his lover, the married Countess Teresa Guiccioli . After long negotiations, Lord Byron was ready to pay for his second illegitimate daughter, who was now Clara Allegra . Little Allegra was educated in the Capuchin monastery in Bagnacavallo in the province of Ravenna , where she died on April 19, 1822 at the age of 5 after suffering from typhoid or malaria . Claire Clairmont blamed her former lover for the death of their daughter and hated him for the rest of their lives.

In the following years Claire Clairmont worked as governess in various cities, including St. Petersburg , Moscow , Berlin , Paris and Dresden . In the 1870s she settled in Florence , where she died at the age of 80. Her remains were buried next to her daughter.

painting

literature

  • Claire Clairmont and Marion Kingston Stocking (Eds.): The Clairmont Correspondence: Letters of Claire Clairmont, Charles Clairmont, and Fanny Imlay Godwin: Letters of Claire Clairmont, Charles Clairmont and Fanny Imlay Godwin, 1808–1879. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, ISBN 0-8018-4633-1 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Clairmont, Claire
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Clairmont, Clara Mary Jane (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer and lover of the poet Lord Byron
DATE OF BIRTH April 27, 1798
PLACE OF BIRTH England
DATE OF DEATH March 19, 1879
Place of death Florence