Preamble
If you enjoy nineteenth-century historical fiction, take a look at my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies: order now!
See also
These lists capture other stories and characters that I thought of as I was reading this piece. I won’t explain why, to avoid spoilers, but they’re associations and not ‘if you liked this, then you’ll love…’ recommendations!
- Fran-Kiss-Stein by Jeanette Winterson
- The Casebook of Doctor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd
- Almost Invincible by Suzanne Burdon
Review (4 out of 5)
I’m grateful to the publisher and to Lesley McDowell through NetGalley for the digital ARC of this book, publishing in February 2024.
The life of Claire Clairmont, the stepsister of Mary Shelley, has always been shrouded in some mystery—the name of her father, the number of her children, the relationship she had with Percy Bysshe Shelley—so it is no surprise that it attracts rewritings and rereadings. McDowell has an intimate knowledge of the primary sources surrounding the Shelleys and their families and circle, seen too in her previous novel about Mary’s childhood friend, Isabella Baxter Booth. This latest novel carefully tracks Clairmont’s entanglements with these famous literary figures while retaining a strong focus on her own inner life. As such, we are treated to a cross-section of Claire’s stories, spanning several decades, that illustrate that even at the scale of a single individual, history doesn’t quite repeat but often rhymes.
I found the first half of this novel quite slow, knowing (as I suspect many do) the historical facts of the relationship between Claire and Byron (called Albe almost exclusively here). Claire is at her least likeable in these earliest moments; her self-importance is almost obnoxious, so certain is she of how her place will be made in the world, and it bears real tragedy. I’d be willing to argue that the feeling of slowness, of dwelling unnecessarily on some of the earliest moments, is a reflection of the teenage Claire’s own emotional state, ponderous and self-regarding, although this line of reasoning didn’t make things go much faster on first reading!
Where Clairmont excels is in the acute descriptions and illustrations of the interpersonal politics at work in the world in which Claire and Mary moved. From a freethinking, blended family, the two middle-class women pose a challenge to Georgian and then Victorian society’s expectations of women. Mary, ultimately, conforms; she marries and plays the literary widow. Claire never does. Defiant and resilient, but no heroine, she moves through society—in England, in France, in Russia—with an incisive understanding of how people relate to and interact with one another.
McDowell captures well the grief caused by the nineteenth century’s high levels of infant mortality, as well as the indignities and abuses of its patriarchal attitudes and norms. There is an acute painfulness to some of the cruelty of Albe, especially in our current post-#MeToo moment, such as the performance of Christabel, during which Albe assaults Claire, but also his drugging of her (and perhaps Mary too) with pennyroyal, an abortifacient. “Lying, meanness, cruelty and treachery,” as Claire herself says of his treatment, and these come to characterise too Shelley, whose friendship with Byron takes precedence over his sense of responsibility to and for Claire and Mary and also, we see, his maid.
This novel excels in its characterisations and presentation of a story at once notorious and obscure. This is a great addition to the neo-Victorian canon.
If you enjoy nineteenth-century historical fiction, take a look at my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies: order now!
Dominique Gracia 
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