A recent episode of Doctor Who featured Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, Percy Shelley and others.

Gossip time:

Claire Clairmont is shown losing interest in Byron during the course of the Doctor Who episode “The Haunting of Villa Diodati.” Clairmont was indeed disillusioned with Byron, though probably not because he hit on The Doctor in front of her.

Clairmont lived with the Shelleys after she left Byron, and at least one friend referred to Claire and Mary as "Shelley's two wives." Shelley advocated for free love, and while Mary doesn't seem to have been totally on board with that, Claire does. There were rumours.

Clairmont and Byron had a daughter, born while Clairmont was living with the Shelleys, and whom Clairmont named "Alba" but Byron renamed "Allegra.” Byron claimed custody, denied Clairmont visitation, and sent Allegra to a convent to be educated, where she subsequently died at five years old.

Unsurprisingly, Clairmont hated Byron for the rest of her life.

ALSO, the famous stormy night depicted in “The Haunting of Villa Diodati” is the legendary origin of Frankenstein. Naturally, the history is more complicated than the legend, and with fewer cybermen.

It is true that Byron challenged everyone to write a ghost story. Percy Shelley and Lord Byron both come up with pretty forgettable stories, and Mary Shelley came up with nothing. She felt inadequate and embarrassed, and harped on the idea. Although was was only 18 at the time, she wrote in her journals about her disappointment with herself that she had yet to show any literary promise. Hanging out with Percy Shelley and Lord Byron probably didn't help much, as although Shelley wasn’t the famous poet at the time that Byron was, he did think of himself as a great literary talent, and it’s probably fair to grant him that he was.

Mary Shelley also felt overshadowed by her parents, who were both literary giants. Mary's father, William Godwin, had fallen a bit out of fashion by the time Mary was 18, but he had once been a hugely popular writer of political theory--the father of English anarchism. He also wrote a popular mystery novel, and a controversially honest memoir of his late wife, Mary's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. In this memoir of Wollstonecraft, Godwin writes about her relationship and daughter with a man she never married, her suicide attempts, other scandals.

Mary Wollstonecraft, although her reputation was damaged in polite society by Godwin's book about her, was a genius. She wrote everything from children's books to philosophical treatises, but is best remembered now for "A Vindication of the Rights of Women,” which is widely considered to be the first work of feminist literature in English.

Mary felt that she had big shoes to fill, and that she wasn’t filling them. And then, after brooding over the ghost story for a while, the idea came to her of a pale scientist conducting a grisly expariment in the depths of a dreary November night, and over the next year she wrote the famous novel.

Incidentally, child William seen in this episode would have been a one year old when she wrote about the murder of Victor Frankenstein's brother William. A little dark.

John Polidori, who is also in the episode of Doctor Who, also wrote a ghost story inspired by that night. His is called The Vampyre, and has been sometimes attributed to Byron and was probably inspired by him, both in that Byron wrote a fragment that inspired Polidori, and also that the main vampire in Polidori's story is probably based on Byron himself. Polidori's Lord Ruthven was almost certainly also an inspirational influence on Bram Stoker's invention of his aristocratic vampire, Count Dracula, because up till then vampires were usually disgusting. Lord Ruthven is the first literary seductive aristocrat vampire. So although Dracula is one step removed, it was ALSO inspired by that stormy night in Geneva.

If you would like to hear more, take my course on Frankenstein or on Dracula, or both!