Claire Clairmont embodied English romanticism in her life, her journals and especially in her letters. As step-daughter of William Godwin, as companion to Shelley and Mary on their elopement, as Shelley's "Constantia," as mother of Byron's Allegra, as a regular member of the Shelley circle (close to Peacock, Leigh Hunt, Hogg, Lady Mount Cashell, and Trelawny), as governess in Russia during the Decembrist Revolution, as confidante of Mary Shelley and Jane Williams in their middle years, and in her old age, as the inspiration of Henry James's "The Aspern Papers", she both lived and recorded the Romantic Revolution. Brought up in the same household as Mary Shelley, dedicated to the principles of Mary Wollstonecraft, Claire was a more enthusiastic feminist than Mary. She wrote on the perils of marriage, on the advantages of illegitimacy, and on the forces that press a woman of no fortune into dependency. She resisted these forces, maintaining her independence in the only career open to her - governess and companion - while dreaming of a "society of free women."
This edition presents the texts of all known surviving letters by Claire Clairmont along with those of her brother Charles Clairmont and her stepsister Fanny Imlay Godwin, 229 letters in all, of which 183 are published here. Claire Clairmont's letters, numbering 190, date from 1815, when she was 17, to two months before her death in 1879. Charles Clairmont's 32 letters begin with schoolboy notes to Godwin in 1808, when he was 13 and conclude in 1849, two months before his death. Fanny Godwin's seven are all from 1816, the year of her suicide at the age of 22. The volumes also include a chronological chart and genealogical tables.
- ISBN10 0801846331
- ISBN13 9780801846335
- Publish Date 1 March 1995
- Publish Status Out of Stock
- Out of Print 9 January 2001
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Johns Hopkins University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 800
- Language English