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