If with a Beating Heart tells the story of
Claire Clairmont, the original Romantic Poet’s Groupie, or so biographers of
Byron and Shelley would have us believe, however Bedford redresses this
assumption by giving us Claire’s point of view, first by an eager young scholar
eager to access her bounteous cache of primary Romantic Poet materials and then
through Claire’s eyes herself.
The title takes itself from the enigmatic
poem ‘To Constantina, Singing” written by Shelley about Clairmont:
Constantia turn!
In thy dark eyes a power like light doth lie
Even though the sounds which were thy voice,
which burn
Between thy lips, are laid to sleep:
Within thy breath, and on thy hair
Like odour, it is yet,
And from thy touch like fire doth leap.
Even while I write, my burning cheeks are wet
Alas, that the torn heart can bleed, but not
forget!
From the beginning the laudanum addicted
Clairmont bristles at the robust egoism of the Young Scholar as he is employed
as a curiosity by Clairmont to record her side of the story, never knowing
whether she is portraying his idols of Shelley and Byron in the view he desires
them to be. However, Clairmont, like a cat with a mouse, toys with the
Scholar’s assumptions and stiff morality and allows him access to her journals
whereby he slowly loses his obsession with the Romantics to somehow take away
something of their spirit, and unshackles himself from a life that was
inauthentic. The story in style is reminiscent of Henry James Aspern Papers.
Bedford too plays with the reader, by
having us question the veracity of Clairmont’s own myth making, so that to the
very end, Clairmont is elusive and fleeting, taking the truth with her to the
grave, and as a reader are left to imbibe the spirit of the Romantics and live
our own lives.
The rivalry with Mary Shelley, her sister
is deftly written. As is Clairmont’s relationship with Shelley, though we never
know whether they were intimate, another tantalizing twist that Clairmont and
Bedford keep us curious about.
Clairmont famously seduced Byron and she
bore his child. Most moving was the cruel conditions in which Clairmont was
forced to give up her child to Byron and his true lack of care, resulting in
him placing the child in a Convent and the child’s subsequent death at age
five. This tragedy shapes Clairmont’s character, and we see what a dangerous
game the Romantic’s played, giving everything up for Truth, Beauty and Love.
However, Bedford leaves the reader knowing this, but the Scholar does not,
unaware yet of the price that must be paid for ‘spontaneous overflow of
powerful feelings’ as Wordsworth wrote.
If With a Beating Heart precedes two other
wonderful novels covering The Romantics, The Merciful Women by Argentine
Federico Andahazi ( which tells Byron’s doctor and companion, Polidori’s story)
and Passion by Jude Morgan ( which tells the story of the Romantics through
Mary Shelley, Caroline Lamb, Fanny Brawne and Augusta Leigh) and sits equal
beside them, telling Clairmont’s story beautifully and economically, without
ever truly giving her beating heart away.
