Sharon L. Joffe – författare

Beyond the Shelley Circle: The Clairmont Family and Its Descendants will interest Shelley-circle researchers, life-writing scholars, and nineteenth-century historians alike. The Clairmont family’s connection to Mary Shelley began in 1801, when her father William Godwin married Mary Jane Vial. The combined family then included the future author of Frankenstein plus her half-sister Fanny, who had been left motherless by the death of Mary Wollstonecraft, and Vial’s two children, Charles and Claire Clairmont (a fifth child, William Godwin Junior, was born in 1803). In 1816, Mary would marry Percy Shelley, thereby creating the extended Wollstonecraft–Godwin–Shelley–Clairmont kinship circle. Despite the often-difficult relationship between Vial and her stepdaughters, the children in the blended family were close into adulthood. Beyond the Shelley Circle traces this history and that of the Clairmont family into the twenty-first century through various personal writings. It includes, in German transcription and English translation, with editorial notes, the previously unpublished journal of Ottilia Clairmont, the wife of Charles’s son, which describes her life in the Banat region in the 1860s. It uses this document and others for a fulsome discussion of life writing in the period, among women, and in literary circles. The book further connects the kinship coterie to other family studies, situating them in a vital tradition within literary studies.

This book explores the significance of the now-lost pavilion built in the Buckingham Palace Gardens in the time of Queen Victoria for understanding experiments in British art and architecture at the outset of the Victorian era. It introduces the curious history of the garden pavilion, its experimental contents, the controversies of its critical reception, and how it has been digitally remediated. The chapters discuss how the pavilion, decorated with frescos and encaustics by some of the most prominent painters of the mid-nineteenth century, became the center of a national conversation about an identity for British art, the capacity of its artists, and the quality of Royal and public taste.Beyond an examination of the pavilion's history, this book also introduces a digital model which restores the pavilion to virtual life, underscoring the importance of the pavilion for Victorian aesthetics and culture.