W omen’s W riting, Volume 6, Number 3, 1999 309 Claire Clairmont and Mary Shelley: identification and rivalry within the “tribe of the Otaheite philosopher’s” DEIRDRE COLEMAN ABSTRACT The relationship between Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont is usually looked at and analysed from Mary’ s point of view. This article reopens the debate on their relationship by demonstrating the importance of Rousseau’ s Julie, ou La Nouvelle Hé lo ïse (1761) for both women. For Claire it offered a way of imaginatively refiguring the triangle of herself, Percy and Mary; for Mary, Rousseau’ s novel proved to be an important influence on the writing of Frankenstein (1818). The principal aim throughout this article is to put Claire centre stage, where she always wished to be. Through emphasising her “ horrors” and her histrionics, and her extraordinary passion for living out literary plots and characters, it is argued that she was more than just a thorn in the side of her stepsister, and that her monstering of herself as the “ third” was part of a serious attempt to rethink monogamous, heterosexual arrangements. The article forms part of the ongoing discussion of female friendship and Sapphism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Until the recent publication of Marion Kingston Stocking’ s T he Clairmont Correspondence (1995) [1], researchers and biographers of Claire Clairmont have had to make do with excerpts and snatches from her letters, published in works such as R. Glynn Grylls’ s biography, Claire Clairmont: M other of Byron’ s Allegra (1939) and G. Paston & P. Quennell’ s “ T o Lord Byron” : Feminine Profiles Based upon Unpublished Letters 1807– 1824 (1939). As the titles of these collections make clear, the interest is not so much in Claire Clairmont as in her relationship with Lord Byron. Claire does not fare much better in biographies of the Shelley circle, often appearing as the rather shadowy, troublesome stepsister of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin – the third who accompanied Mary when she eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley in the summer of 1814.[2] Only with the publication in 1968 of Claire Clairmont’ s Journals , also edited by Marion Stocking [3], did