Some weeks ago I left Claire Claremont in Florence in 1823 grieving the deaths of her child Allegra and ex- lover Percy Bysshe Shelley plus the loss of any hope of reuniting with her fantasy lover Alfred, Lord Byron. She was 25 years old – she lived on, wallowing it seems in her grief and clinging to the remnants of her past represented by Shelley’s letters and a few souvenirs of their time as a “menage a trois” with her half sister Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Shelley)

The last of her remaining 55 years were spent in Florence on Via Romana 43 -close by one of the back entrances to the Boboli Gardens, eking out her £12,000 inheritance from Shelley, and negotiating with would be Romantic poets biographers as to the value of her memoirs.

This story has been expertly developed by Emma Tennant in her novel Felony as the origin of the theme of Henry James’s great novella The Aspern Papers.  The concept certainly has merit – Claire died in Florence in 1879 not long before the writer was staying there at Villa Brichieri Colombi  in as a guest of Isa Blagden (not Fenimore Cooper?) and those who knew the history of this curious “Inglese” also knew about her passionate protection of her precious letters!

Claire’s half sister Mary Shelley had many problems with her husband and women , and Claire it seems was not the least of them – she claimed to be more in tune with his ideas of Free love than his wife was prepared to be and whilst Mary always declared it to have been impossible ,given the small size of the lodgings they all shared,  for any impropriety to have taken place – there was always a persistent rumour that Claire had had a “love child” by not just one, but two, of the great Victorian Romantic Poets!