The Unbound Book Festival is coming up this weekend, and KBIA has been talking to featured writers in a series we're calling "Unbound Conversations." Find the rest of them here.
You may have heard this story before: four writers, trapped by inclement weather at Lake Geneva, engage in a scary story contest. While Lord Byron and Percy Shelley failed to complete their tales, Mary Shelley and John Polidori produced seminal works of Gothic fiction in Frankenstein and The Vampyre. But there was a fifth member of their party.
KBIA’s Kiana Fernandes sat down with author Emily Franklin to talk about Claire Clairmont, the protagonist of her historical fiction novel Love & Other Monsters and the occupant of Villa Diodati that history often overlooks. Here’s an excerpt from their conversation:
Kiana Fernandes: When did Claire Clairmont first enter your life, enter your awareness?
Emily Franklin: In 2009, I read an op-ed written by Guillermo del Toro, who we know just released his new interpretation of Frankenstein. And he talked about the summer that this all takes place — the Year Without [a] Summer. So, I was intrigued with this literary gathering.
And so, I dug a little deeper and found that the 1831 edition of Frankenstein — which was the first time it was published under Mary Shelley's name — originally, it was released anonymously, and a lot of people thought it was Percy Shelley's work. In the preface, she talks about the origin story of how she came to write Frankenstein. And she says there were four of us there that summer, and she leaves out Claire Clairmont. And this is in print. And it was documented that Claire was there, we know she was there. And so, wondering why somebody would write their own stepsister out of a story was really the initial entry point for me.
Fernandes: A line that stuck out to me when I was reading was something along the lines of, figure out why you write, and then what you cover will follow. How does this idea relate to your construction of this book and landing on the topic for this book?
Franklin: Originally when I set out to write it, I really thought it was going to be told from multiple points of view. I thought this was about the making of art from these literary celebrities of their time. But every time I sat down to write, Claire's voice kept sort of whispering a little bit louder and tapping me on the shoulder a little bit more.
She's got Percy Shelley, who's five, six years older than she is and definitely intrigued and involved with her. And she's got Lord Byron, who is 28 and this super, super famous man, and they're intimately involved. So really, this is a story of a young woman being pursued by these two older, powerful men who are different, but both sort of dashing and complicated and dangerous in their own ways.
"Wherever there is an abuse of power, there's complicity involved, there are cover-ups, and there's the need that everybody has to make a story more palatable than it might be."Emily Franklin
And then midway through, I realized I had sort of fallen for the same story that women fall for all the time. And this wasn't really just a Jane Austen plot of this young woman being pursued by these two dashing men. This was a story of an abuse of power and manipulation in art.
This is Claire's story, but it's also the story of what it's like to grow up as a girl, and we're seeing it in the news now.
We're seeing that wherever there is an abuse of power, there's complicity involved, there are cover-ups, and there's the need that everybody has to make a story more palatable than it might be.
And so, I was really trying to get at, what is the truth for Claire? What was Claire's story? I just wanted to give voice to, I guess, Claire's ghost.
