Serial cheat Lord Byron (sketch c 1815 by GH Harlow)
An early form of kiss 'n' tell is to be found in a fascinating new book from Bloomsbury titled Young Romantics by Daisy Hay.
It contains a newly discovered brief memoir by Claire Clairmont (1798-1879), Mary Shelley's step-sister, who had a brief fling in 1816 with Byron and was left preggers by him in her teens. By her seventies she'd long abandoned her hedonistic ways and embraced Catholicism which may explain why she writes: "Under the influence of the doctrine and belief of free love, I saw the two first poets of England… become monsters."
She adds: "The worshippers of free love not only preyed upon one another" but also on themselves, "turning their existence into a perfect hell". Byron was "a human tyger [sic] slaking his thirst for inflicting pain upon defenceless women." Shelley was no better, she chronicles.
It's a marvellous example of the kiss 'n' tell form. A woman throws herself at a star she knows to be married, basks in the intense heat of a cock-cunting infatuation before getting dumped with more than she bargained for. She then absolves herself of any personal responsibility in a tell-all, heaping all blame on her failed investment. It's a wonder Claire doesn't complain of being roasted by the two poets at some 5 star inn.
Her ghost may be consoled that the baby-women she exemplifies can now make a fortune from parading their sob stories in the tabloids.
10 comments:
Madame, should you not be showing solidarity with your sisters of the sob? You grow more peculiar by the day.
The term is 'baby-mama'. Baby-women sounds far too PC and middle-class.
Just because Byron and Shelley were more likely to own black people than know any shouldn't stop you from speaking their patois without guilt or restraint.
We're all multicultural now.
Baby-women is nicely literal, I've never heard of baby-mamas. Certain women really must start to own their consciences, as I do.
I second the view that Arcati has grown very peculiar. Does VO take a break these days as he studies his (Ur)anus?
A good spot. Clairmont's memoir contrasts badly with Julie Kavanagh's "consensual kiss 'n tell" in which neither Martin Amis nor she is blamed for anything in particular, though we learn of Mart's sneaky two timing ways under a table. It's a well told romp with loads of literary gossip. And no self-pity.
Is that THE Nirpal Dhaliwal, the love rat exposed by his long-suffering wife Liz Jones? Truly Arcati draws in all sorts, including sexual vagabonds.
As the receiver of semen, a woman is entitled to punish a man who uses her as a depository. "Madame" will know all about that ....
<< It's a marvellous example of the kiss 'n' tell form. >>
Hmmm. Don't forget the famous "publish and be damned" attributed to the duke of Wellington. This is what he reputedly replied in 1824 to her former mistress Harriet Wilson who threatened to publish his love letters to her.
You can see how the tabloids came about then.
I have never heard of Nirpal Dhaliwal.
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