Claire Clairmont
Clara Mary Jane Clairmont, better known as Claire Clairmont (* April 27, 1798 in England; † March 19, 1879 in Florence) was a British educator, writer for travel literature and the mistress of the famous poet Lord Byron.
Life
Clara Mary Jane Clairmont was the illegitimate daughter of Mary Jane Vial and a certain Charles Clairmont. Mary Jane Vial had an older, equally illegitimate child. To escape social ostracism, she pretended to be a widow. Your livelihood, she earned with translations from the French. In December 1801 Mary Jane Clairmont married the widowed philosopher and poet William Godwin ( 1756-1836 ). The two step-sisters, she grew up with, were Fanny Imlay, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and the American speculator Gilbert Imlay and Mary Godwin, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. The marriage of William Godwin and Mary Jane Clairmont came among his friends incomprehension. Mary Jane Clairmont was considered vulgar and dishonest. Two years later the common son, William Jr. (1803-1832), born. The family lived in difficult and poor conditions. William Godwin was constantly in debt, since the revenues from the sale of his books was not sufficient to feed the now family of 7.
In 1812 the writer Percy Bysshe Shelley ( 1792-1822 ) took on Contact to the revered William Godwin. In 1814 he met at the home of William Godwin probably the first time Mary Godwin. Although married and the father of a young daughter, the eccentric and erratic Percy Shelley fell in love with Mary Godwin. William Godwin had indeed marriage condemned as absurd monopoly in his major philosophical work "An Inquiry Concerning Political Justice " (1792 ). He had, however, been largely resolved in the meantime from these radical views. In Percy Shelley's confession that exists between Mary Godwin and giving it a violent love affair, William Godwin responded accordingly violently. He tried to stop the relationship; Claire Clairmont was among other things the one that submitted letters between the two. On July 28 1814 Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin were burning through to Europe; Mary's stepsister Claire accompanied them. From Paris we went through Switzerland to Germany. They soon decided to return because of financial difficulties to London. Upon their return, William Godwin contact with his two daughters refused to accept. They lived alternately in different apartments in London and on the coast and had recurrent financial difficulties. The sisters spent a lot of time the great works of Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau, Shakespeare, but also the books of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft to read. Claire Clairmont tried his hand as playwright and received by a feint access to Byron. Between the two, there was a love affair, was pregnant with Claire Clairmont shortly before the end of the relationship.
The death of Sir Bysshe Shelley, Shelley's grandfather, at the beginning of 1816 facilitated the tight financial situation of the trio something. Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley wanted to actually settle in Italy. Claire Clairmont persuaded them first to travel to Lake Geneva. She knew that Lord Byron had the same destination, and hoped to be able there to revive the relationship. The May 1816 spent Mary, Percy and Claire with Lord Byron and his personal physician John Polidori on Lake Geneva, where Byron's Villa Diodati had one of those famous meetings (see the film Gothic, 1987 by Ken Russell), where the friends stories of supernatural events narrated.
Claire brought on 13 January 1817 in Bath, a daughter, who initially named Alba received, to the world. In the spring of 1818 Claire went a third time to the Continent, to Italy, to search for Lord Byron. This she found in Venice, where he lived with his mistress, the Countess married Teresa Guiccioli a complex life. Lord Byron was, after long negotiations ready for his second illegitimate daughter, who now Clara Allegra was financially pay. The Little Allegra was educated in the Capuchin monastery in Bagnacavallo in the province of Ravenna, where she died after a typhoid or malaria disease on April 19, 1822 at the age of 5 years. Claire Clairmont made her former lover for the death of their daughter responsible, and hated him for the rest of their lives.
In the following years, Claire Clairmont as a governess in various cities, including St. Petersburg, Moscow, Berlin, Paris and Dresden. In the 1870s, she settled in Florence, where she died at the age of 80 years. Their remains were buried next to her daughter.
Painting
George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron Byron
Amelia Curran: Clara Allegra Byron Clairmont, Oil on canvas, 1819