Clairmont by Lesley McDowell is a different side of the romantic poets

(Wildfire, £18.99)

The year of 1816 has been called “the year without a summer”. Following the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, sheets of rain swept across Europe and crops failed. Over this failed summer, Percy and Mary Shelley were famously ensconced in the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva with Lord Byron and his friend John Polidori, their extended stay resulting in Mary Shelley’s landmark Gothic novel Frankenstein and Polidori’s The Vampyre.

One crucial member of their party, however, has been more or less written out of the story: Mary Shelley’s step-sister, Claire Clairmont.

Having set her heart on seducing Lord Byron back in England, the 18-year-old Claire had secured an introduction to him through Percy Shelley, and followed the Shelleys to Switzerland, where she and Byron resumed their brief, unequal affair. The summer that Frankenstein was conceived, Claire found she was pregnant with Byron’s child.

READ MORE:

'A novel of sex, siblings and the end of the world' - 10 new books to read this month

John Martyn: Graeme Thomson's Small Hours is a no-holds-barred story

An Ordinary Youth by Walter Kempowski is timely and terrifying

Happy to take sexual advantage of her when it suited him, the poet refused to be tied down by her, initially ignoring their daughter, Allegra, then placing her in a convent, where she died, aged five.

Lesley McDowell has already authored one novel inspired by a member of Mary Shelley’s circle, 2013’s Unfashioned Creatures, about her friend Isabella Baxter Booth. This latest argues that Claire Clairmont amounted to more than just her proximity to the Romantic poets.

The inescapable fact of her association with Byron, and the tragic death of their daughter, loomed over her for the rest of her days. But she lived on for another 60 years, and McDowell’s novel sets out to show that the remainder of her life was important too. Received wisdom tells us that women of the 19th Century needed a husband to support them, but Claire Clairmont was able to live out her days unmarried and independent, though not necessarily content.

McDowell’s depiction of the Romantic poets gathered in Villa Diodati, unsurprisingly, presents us with a pretty unhealthy scene: a bunch of unbearably self-absorbed, languid radicals espousing notions of free love while rarely seeming to display any genuine affection or concern for each other.

It’s hard to imagine this unstable group lasting had Shelley and Byron not suffered early deaths. Byron’s self-regard verges on the monstrous, but none is especially likeable, and that includes Claire herself. They set the tone for an eloquent, but muted and melancholy, novel.

Clairmont by Scottish author Lesley McDowell (Image: free)

McDowell interleaves scenes from Switzerland in 1816 with non-chronological slices of Claire’s later life. In 1825, she is a governess to a family in Russia, considering the romantic overtures of her tutor colleague and terrified that her past as a bohemian radical will come to light. By 1843, she is in Paris, living alone but attending salons and carrying on an affair with a much younger man.

The central thread throughout all of this is Claire’s turbulent relationship with step-sister Mary. After Shelley’s death, Mary ascends to the status of the famous widow of a revered poet, embracing respectability while raising their son, also called Percy.

Meanwhile, Claire, the unsung secret lover of another legendary poet, lives an itinerant life of transitory relationships on the continent. Tension and resentment simmer between them, not least when Mary tries to persuade Claire to surrender half of the bequest left to her by Shelley, on the grounds that she and Percy need it more.

For all that she’s headstrong, temperamental and nurses long-held grudges, Claire is sympathetically portrayed as a brave woman who never fulfilled her potential but battled on regardless. Lesley McDowell rescues her from the shadows of history and gives her the starring role she was denied in life.