Wildfire signs McDowell’s retelling of the life of ‘the secret muse of the Romantics’

Wildfire has acquired Lesley McDowell’s feminist historical retelling of the life of Claire Clairmont, “the secret muse of the Romantics”.

Fiction publisher Jack Butler acquired world rights including film and TV to Clairmont from Ian Drury at Sheil Land Associates. It will be published in hardback, trade paperback, e-book and audio in February 2024 which is the 200-year anniversary of Lord Byron’s death.

Clairmont follows Claire, Mary Shelley’s step-sister and lover to the infamous poet Lord Byron. The premise of the novel is taken from the Shelleys’ visit to Byron’s villa on Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816, and the stormy night Mary Shelley came up with an idea that became her masterpiece, Frankenstein.

The synopsis goes on: “Claire has a more pressing reason for joining Mary and Percy on this wonderfully Gothic trip, however, she’s pregnant with Byron’s child, a child Byron doesn’t want, and scarcely believes is his own. Clairmont will offer a unique fly-on-the-wall perspective for one of the greatest moments in literary history and the tragedy at its heart: the woman and her child that history tried to forget.”

Butler said: “Claire’s story is incredible, at times it beggars belief that this little-known figure from history could have gone unnoticed for so long. Lesley is a serious devotee of Clairmont and the Shelleys – she has spent countless hours pouring over Claire’s little-read letters and diaries to capture her voice and the result is as authentic as it is powerful.”

McDowell said: “My fascination with Claire started 25 years ago when I first read her letters and journals, so to be able to show her as the heroine of her own story, and not as a witness to others’ greatness or as a footnote to someone else’s life is a long-cherished dream come true.”

McDowell’s first novel, The Picnic (Black and White Publishing), was published in 2007, and her second, Unfashioned Creatures (Saraband), about Mary Shelley’s childhood friend, Isabella Baxter Booth, was published in 2013.

She has also published non-fiction, Between the Sheets: The Literary Liaisons of Nine 20th Century Women Writers (Gerald Duckworth & Co), which was shortlisted for the Scottish Book of the Year Award 2011 (non-fiction), and has a PhD on the work of James Joyce. In 2014, she was Writer in Residence at Gladstone’s Library, and is the recipient of three Creative Scotland Awards. Clairmont will be her third novel.