Episode 824: Claire Clairmont with Emily Franklin

In Episode 824, Jacke talks to novelist Emily Franklin about her new book Love & Other Monsters, which narrates the story of a circle of friends from the point of view of Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley's stepsister.

It's an often-told, momentous story: how in the summer of 1816, four friends, including famed Romantic poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, along with Mary Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelley) and Byron's doctor John Polidori, gathered in a Swiss villa and decided to tell each other ghost stories to pass the time. Mary Shelley began to write Frankenstein, and John Polidori wrote what would become the first modern vampire tale. It's hard to imagine a more spectacular outcome for four people--except that there were not four people involved. There were five. There was Claire Clairmont, whom Mary tried to erase from history.

For a different perspective about this circle of friends, take a listen to Episode 744, in which Jacke talks to Caroline Lea about her novel Love, Sex, and Frankenstein, which tells the haunting, evocative story of the summer of 1816 that should have broken Mary Shelley, but instead inspired her to write her Gothic masterpiece!