Claire Clairmont

Well, the monsters, it's up to the reader to, to decide who exactly is the monster, but there are a f- a few candidates.

There's Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, the most radical of the Romantic era poets, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, Claire Clairmont, Mary's stepsister, and they were all part of the Shelley circle at a really fascinating time in both politics and literature.

Now, I mentioned, uh, in my very opening of the program, Robert Emmet and the link to Frankenstein.

It, it's a bit tenuous, but it's really there.

In 1816, a massive volcanic eruption in, in Indonesia had darkened skies across the globe, and it gave Europe what is known as the Year Without a Summer.

Lord Byron, traveling the continent to escape a collapsing marriage and a wave of scandal back in England, rented a house called the Villa Diodati, and he was joined there by the poet Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin, who would soon become Mary Shelley, um, her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, that's a good name, and Byron's personal physician, a young doctor named John Polidori.

Trapped inside by ruined weather, this group challenged each other to write a ghost story.

Now, we [laughs] if the story sounds familiar, that is because we have discussed it before, because Mary Shelley, her story, her contribution, eventually became Frankenstein.

And Percy is there.

Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, is there.

And renting the nearby Villa Diodati is the infamous scandalous Lord Byron, along with his personal physician, John Polidori.

So you have a confined space filled with young, radical, brilliant romantics armed with formidable intellects and absolutely nothing to do but sit inside while a climate disaster rages outside.

Mm-hmm

... uh, who was the lover, um, mistress of Percy Shelley, the great poet, and her half-sister, Claire Clairmont.

That was on one side [laughs] of the, of the deal.

Now, the other side was one of the greatest poets of all time, Lord George Byron.

Actually, I think it was the Prussians, but, uh, what can you do? So he said, "Uh, Polidori, let's go to Switzerland, far away from all the people I owe money to."

[laughs]

Now, at the same time, Percy Shelley, who was married, but he had pretty much kind of tossed his wife aside, uh, he had s- said to Mary Godwin, his, uh, little, uh, side thing, and her sister, uh, Claire Clairmont, uh, "Let's go to Scotland, I want to see mountains." Well, Claire Clairmont, the most useless person in the drama, turned out to be the pawn that became a queen that became a pawn again.

Hmm.