Volume 43, Number 6 · April 4, 1996
An Affair to Remember
By Anne Barton
The Clairmont Correspondence: Letters of Claire Clairmont, Charles Clairmont, and Fanny Imlay Godwin, Volume I (1808–1834), Volume II (1835–1879)
edited by Marion Kingston Stocking
Johns Hopkins University Press, 704 (two volumes) pp., $65.00
'Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,/ And did he stop and speak to you?' Browning marveled in Men and Women, recalling a scrap of conversation he had overheard as a boy. Henry James, who could have seen Claire Clairmont plain, and at an even greater remove in time, missed the opportunity. In the 1908 preface to The Aspern Papers, he recorded his astonished discovery that, on several visits to Florence, he had 'passed again and again, all unknowing,' the door of that house in the Via Romana where 'sat above, within call and in her habit as she lived,' the woman who had been Mary Shelley's stepsister, the daughter by an unknown father of William Godwin's second wife, and mother, after her brief affair with Byron, of Allegra, his short-lived child.
Review, 5492 words
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