Poesie Toscane, with inscription from Shelley to Clairmont

David Leigh-Hunt, Trustee, writes:  The Keats-Shelley Memorial Association, a UK registered charity, was founded in 1903 to maintain and support the Keats-Shelley House at 26 Piazza di Spagna, Rome, where the English poet John Keats died in 1821. 

Claire Clairmont (1798-1879) became Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s stepsister when her mother Mary Jane de Vial (calling herself Mrs Clairmont) married the philosopher William Godwin in 1801. In 1816 she had a brief affair with Lord Byron and their child was born on 12th January 1817, initially named Alba. While pregnant, she had taken Mary and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) to Lake Geneva to meet Byron, with whom they spent the notorious summer of 1816 writing gothic tales (including the first draft of Frankenstein by the 18-year-old Mary Shelley). Claire spent 14 months with her child (later renamed Allegra) until the awkwardness of their family household made her opt to give the child in custody to Byron, who kept the her in his Venice and Ravenna mansions. When Byron moved to Pisa in 1821, however, Allegra was placed in the San Giovanni Battista convent at Bagnacavallo (Ravenna), where she died on 20th April 1822 because of what was probably a typhoid fever. Claire never recovered from the loss and kept thinking about Allegra for the rest of her long life, during which she worked as a governess throughout Europe, going as far as Russia. She outlived most of the members of the Shelley circle, dying at 80 in Florence after having reconciled to Catholicism.

Her relationship with P. B. Shelley has often been debated and she was certainly one of the most important women of his life. It is probable that the present volumes were a present for Claire's 23rd birthday on 27th April 1821. Their author, Vincenzo da Filicaja (1642-1707), was a lyric poet beloved by Shelley and his circle. Poesie toscane was particularly suitable for Claire, who had made Florence her home. Filicaja's most famous sonnet, included in the present collection, is perhaps 'Italia, Italia, O tu cui feo la sorte', translated and included by Byron in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (‘Italia! oh Italia! thou who hast / The fatal gift of beauty’), whilst Mary Shelley included a brief biography of de Filicaja in her Italian and Spanish Lives.

This two-volume edition is one of only ten surviving books with Shelley's presentation inscriptions, and is the second Shelley-inscribed book in the collection of the Keats-Shelley House in Rome (the other being an edition of Homer once belonging to, and inscribed by, the poet, which was donated by Lord Abinger).