LOVE & OTHER MONSTERS

Claire Clairmont—free-thinker, “foraging wild woman,” lover of Lord Byron and stepsister of Mary Shelley—was present at but erased from the history of a mythic moment in English literature.

Franklin follows her novel about Isabella Stewart Gardner with another bio-fiction, this time based on the life of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s less famous stepsister. Narrated from 1879, the story hinges on Claire’s journal of the year 1816, when she was 17, living with Mary and her partner, poet Percy Shelley, in London, helping Mary with her infant son. The couple are unwed, Shelley being already married—such is the era’s modernism, to which Claire herself subscribes, boldly writing to the famous, wealthy, wildly successful poet Byron. She falls under his languid spell and becomes his lover, their consummation delayed by intense foreplay. Claire then engineers a summer meeting between Byron and the Shelleys at Lake Geneva, with the two households as neighbors, Byron in the grander dwelling, Villa Diodati. Franklin’s lengthy, detailed tale expends the bulk of its pages in this famous setting, where the men discuss writing and ideas while the women speculate on masculinity. Claire’s first-person narration delivers an immersion into her introverted, lonely, sensitive, unconventional persona among this creative group: Mary, with whom the relationship is close but combative; Shelley, who has a sexual interest in her; John Polidori, a physician with his own sexual preferences; and Byron, mercurial, both available (sometimes) and distant. The author’s lyrical prose doesn’t wholly distract from a sense of stasis as the days pass, the weather, food, moods, and correspondence are explored, until eventually the moment comes when the group decides to write ghost stories, including what will be Mary’s classic Frankenstein, and Claire declares a turning point of her own. Above all, the novel is a devoted restoration of a figure whose presence and contribution were obscured by men’s—and Mary’s—interventions.

A satisfying if overlong act of literary reanimation, appropriate to its setting.