Sharon L. Joffe

Beyond the Shelley Circle

Beyond the Shelley Circle: The Clairmont Family and Its Descendants will interest Shelley-circle researchers, life-writing scholars, and nineteenth-century historians alike. The Clairmont family's connection to Mary Shelley began in 1801, when her father William Godwin married Mary Jane Vial. The combined family then included the future author of Frankenstein plus her half-sister Fanny, who had been left motherless by the death of Mary Wollstonecraft, and Vial's two children, Charles and Claire Clairmont (a fifth child, William Godwin Junior, was born in 1803). In 1816, Mary would marry Percy Shelley, thereby creating the extended Wollstonecraft-Godwin-Shelley-Clairmont kinship circle. Despite the often-difficult relationship between Vial and her stepdaughters, the children in the blended family were close into adulthood. Beyond the Shelley Circle traces this history and that of the Clairmont family into the twenty-first century through various personal writings. It includes, in German transcription and English translation, with editorial notes, the previously unpublished journal of Ottilia Clairmont, the wife of Charles's son, which describes her life in the Banat region in the 1860s. It uses this document and others for a fulsome discussion of life writing in the period, among women, and in literary circles. The book further connects the kinship coterie to other family studies, situating them in a vital tradition within literary studies.