The Missing Novels of Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont
Hate and The Idiot – Competition of Two Sisters
Mary Shelley is certainly famous for her seminal novel of Frankenstein, and she wrote other books to follow, but her first attempt at a novel begun during her teenage elopement and journey across Europe during the summer of 1814 with Percy Shelley and her step-sister Claire née Jane Clairmont is long missing, with only a brief reference to it in letters and her journal. And it was from that journey as well, Claire also attempted a novel, long missing to literature’s judgment.
Mary Shelley, still then Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, began a book while traveling on route back to England after the adventures of France and Switzerland only known by its title “Hate”. Mary herself never publicly elaborated on its theme or content, except that it apparently brought some amusement to Shelley. She abandoned it before completion and one could imagine it might contain themes she would revisit in her later published book, and may have been inspired by the emotional reaction to experiences of her journey of six weeks together with her step-sister and her lover across the devastated lands of France ravaged by the recent Napoleonic War. The title is at the least, tantalizing.
Claire had also begun a novel at the age of 16, with a title no less curious and intriguing for its sharp brevity, “The Idiot”. It is also lost to time and mystery, and its fate may be evidenced in her later expression of some jealousy over her sister’s and her family’s literary success, writing after the death of her brother William in 1832, “In our family, if you cannot write an epic poem or novel that by its originality knocks all other novels on the head, you are a despicable creature, not worth acknowledging.” And wondering, “What would they have done or said had their children been fond of dress, fond of cards, drunken, profligate, as most people’s children are?” – a decided contrast between her Clairmont family character and the more serious Godwins.
In her diary of September of 1814 begun after her travels, Claire would write of wanting to create a character whose independence of mind would cause others to judge them as an “Ideot”. There is evidence that Claire sent this work, perhaps more work-in-progress than completed novel, to Lord George Byron, when she had insinuated an introduction to him in 1816. She noted in letters, using her then preferred name of Clara Clairmont, that it was “half a novel or a tale”, with the pretext of looking for career advice. She was undecided upon either a writing career or an entrance onto the stage through Byron’s connection to the Drury Lane Theater, though she was possibly most interested in a romance with the poet.
Bryon apparently did not respond to it at the time. In a rather desperate sounding and forward letter of a young acolyte who had not received a response, she wrote him, “If you said you were too busy to look at it, I should have understood …it may arise from your affairs and then I am tiresome; or it may be occasioned by negligence, which to me is at least as bad.” Apparently in her eagerness, she made the mistake of submitting a first incomplete draft to someone who didn’t know her. And one may imagine what someone of Byron’s place with many eager fans may have thought of the submission. “Will you make allowance for my years? I do not expect you to approve; all I wish to know is whether I have talents, which, if aided by severe study may render me fit to become an author. I had half resolved to correct and revise it; but afterword, thought if you saw it just as it was, written at intervals, and in scraps, you would be a better judge.”
As for what the story was, she did outline her theme. “My intention was to draw a character committing every violence against received opinion…who knew no other guide on the impulses arising from herself, than herself…whose sweetness and naiveté of character should draw upon her the pity rather than the contempt of her readers.” The story also dealt with themes of Atheism and Christianity and bore some evidence of the journey she had undertaken with her step-sister and Shelley as told in The Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley, the Frankenstein Diaries.
“It is at present in a very rude state; perhaps the whole of the first part should be rewritten,” she went on. “The tale is too abruptly begun; I am aware that the first sentence rather tempts one to throw the book down than to continue.” Not the most positive way to present a work for judgment. It is difficult to judge the book with no example remaining, but not hard to suggest that her writing as a teenager may not have been to the standard of her relatives, though her later letters evidenced her skill with words and her intelligence. And where Mary Shelley had resolved not to make herself the protagonist of her stories, Claire’s book seemed as if it was decidedly focused on herself, if in thin disguise. Mary would begin Frankenstein about the same time that Claire was presenting her draft to Byron, and would go though many revisions with the help of Shelley.
While Bryon showed no interest in the book by Miss Clairmont, she pursued him in person, resulting in a daughter between them. Byron rejected Claire when she came to him pregnant with his child and had apparently coldly rejected her as he did her writing. She would write to him in 1816 following the summer in Geneva in a letter full desperation at his indifference and longing for his attention, “Now, if I tell you my thoughts, dearest, you mustn’t bring them against me to make me look foolish as you did that hateful novel thing I wrote.”
Percy Shelley may have given Claire some assistance with her story and attempted to help her get it published in 1817, offering it to two publishers, Thomas Hookham, where at the same time he and Mary were publishing their travel journal “History of a Six Weeks Tour”, and to John Murray. Claire’s book was rejected, and never heard from again. She did have the last laugh though on her tragic family circle of romantics, by living to the age of 80.