Page "Claire Clairmont" Paragraph 14

Percy Bysshe Shelley Clairmont may have been sexually involved with Percy Bysshe Shelley at different periods, though Clairmont's biographers, Gittings and Manton, find no hard evidence.

Their friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg joked about " Shelley and his two wives ," Mary and Claire, a remark that Clairmont recorded in her own journal.

Clairmont was also entirely in sympathy, more so than Mary, with Shelley's theories about free love, communal living, and the right of a woman to choose her own lovers and initiate sexual contact outside of marriage.

She seemed to conceive of love as a " triangle " and enjoyed being the third.

She had also formed a close friendship with Shelley, who called her " my sweet child " and inspired and fed off his work.

Mary Shelley's early journals record several times when Clairmont and Shelley shared visions of Gothic horror and let their imaginings take flight, stirring each others ' emotions to the point of hysteria and nightmares.

In October 1814, Shelley deliberately frightened Clairmont by assuming a particularly sinister and horrifying facial expression.

" How horribly you look ... Take your eyes off!

" she cried.

She was put to bed after yet another of her " horrors.

" Percy Bysshe Shelley described her expression to Mary Shelley as " distorted most unnaturally by horrible dismay ".

In the autumn of 1814 Clairmont and Shelley also discussed forming " an association of philosophical people " and Clairmont's conception of an idealized community in which women were the ones in charge.