Horrid Mysteries of Cl Cl 26: A Tale of Mothers and Daughters

Abstract

Claire Clairmont (1798–1879), her journals and letters brilliantly edited, is in no danger of being lost to history. However, a significant quantity of her writing remains only partially published, autobiographical memoranda and (apparently) copies of letters that she prepared in the 1870s at the urging of E. J. Trelawny. These manuscripts, 159 pages in total, are catalogued as Cl Cl 26 in the Pforzheimer Collection at the New York Public Library. Extracts, with warnings to readers not to trust these papers, have appeared in biographies and editions; they narrate some of the most dramatic and painful episodes of Clairmont’s life: her 1814 elopement with Mary Godwin and P. B. Shelley; the suicides of Harriet Shelley and Frances Imlay Godwin; the life and death of Allegra, her daughter by Byron, who died aged five. In the aggregate they are repetitive, incoherent, untruthful, and deeply informed by anger at Byron and Shelley. Perhaps the most mysterious component of Cl Cl 26 is a series of letters purporting to be from Clairmont’s mother, Mary Jane Godwin, to Margaret Moore, Lady Mount Cashell, in childhood Mary Wollstonecraft’s pupil and in adulthood a friend of the Shelleys and Clairmont’s special protector. Like Clairmont, both these women gave birth to daughters out of wedlock. The letters, concerned with the 1814 elopement and its aftermath, contain details found nowhere else. Clairmont tells Trelawny that she was given them by Lady Mount Cashell on Clairmont’s last visit to her in Pisa in 1832. Comprised of two sets of drafts, they survive only in the copies in Clairmont’s hand and contain errors pointing to composition much later than 1814. Nonetheless, most editors have accepted that Mary Jane Godwin did indeed write the letters and that her daughter then doctored them. Andrew Stott has suggested in an unpublished essay that Clairmont simply wrote them herself. In this article I follow the implications of this idea, first by reviewing Claire Clairmont’s life to understand why, in its evening, she might have impersonated her mother and by proxy her mother’s supposed correspondent, in writing this version of the decisive events of her youth; and second, to explore where this, her most fully realized work of fiction, might have come from. If we accept her as the sole author, we gain a new view of her: Clairmont as a writer. We know from her journals and letters that she tried intermittently to write fiction; she did publish one short story. She was keenly aware that writing was the family business and that she had not come up to scratch. We may see, then, in these letters, a final effort to tell her story. Much of the work of this article will be to attend to her inflections as she writes and rewrites, and to learn from the physical evidence offered by the manuscripts. With or without originals, in her work on this project Claire Clairmont would have felt herself, aged seventy-seven, sheltered again by the only two women whom she had ever experienced as protectors.