My current novel is a historical-biographical novel about Claire Clairmont, who is best known as Mary Shelley’s step-sister and some-time mistress of Byron, and the mother of his child, Allegra. I came across her when I was reviewing an edition of a newly discovered Mary Shelley story for children, called ‘Maurice, or The Fisher’s Cot’. In the introduction, the biographer Claire Tomalin mentioned Claire and the ‘lost children’ of the Shelley-Byron circle. I had a hazy recollection of Claire from student days reading Shelley, but I had no idea about her afterlife, once Shelley had drowned, and Byron died. When I found out that she went on to become a governess in Russia, and live on her own in Paris, to be self-sufficient at a time when women had to marry to survive, I knew I wanted to
