Baron George Gordon Byron had become an overnight literary sensation in 1812, and lived accordingly; he spent profligately, abused alcohol and opium, and fornicated indiscriminately with both men and women. Byron slept with Claire because she was there and willing, the biographers say. But why did Claire so desperately want to sleep with Byron? “I don’t think Claire knows about the gay stuff, and he has a reputation as a ladies’ man,” says Gordon. “For her, it’s like sleeping with Mick Jagger.” That her poet-boyfriend was more esteemed and famous than Mary’s was icing on the cake.
Neither woman suspected that their getaway’s central romance would, in fact, be the bromance between Percy and Byron. To be clear, it’s not certain that the two were physically romantic in Geneva: “Whether their genitals touched, I don’t know,” says Gordon. “But they’re fawning all over each other and their ideas.” Ignoring their relative partners, the men took day trips together, sailed and swam, had deep discussions about Napoleon. By the end of the vacation, Bryon was what Gordon calls “heartily sick” of Claire, who was also newly sick herself; she was pregnant with Bryon’s baby.
Dr. John William Polidori: Bryon’s Secretary, Companion, “Personal Physician”
Complicating matters further, Byron had traveled to Geneva with another guest: 21-year-old doctor John Polidori. “Bryon travels with a personal physician, like Michael Jackson,” explains Sampson. The pair’s relationship was volatile and complicated, and some modern-day scholars suspect the perpetually single doctor of being secretly in love with Bryon. Polidori not-so-subtly based the seductive blood-sucking aristocrat in his story, The Vampyre, on the poet. Three years later, the story was published under Byron’s byline.
At the Geneva villa, Byron and Percy mercilessly teased Polidori, giving him the effeminate nickname “Polly-Dolly.” To compensate, perhaps, Polidori wrote endlessly in his diary about Mary, for whom he dramatically jumped off a balcony and sprained his ankle. “Now Polidori’s in love with Mary per se, because really they’re all in love with Byron—except Mary, who’s busy with her six-month-old son and writing her masterpiece,” says Gordon. After shutting him down repeatedly, Mary would leave Geneva at the end of the summer and never again see Polidori—who never married, and died by suspected suicide five years after the trip. So too did Percy’s estranged wife, allowing the Shelleys to finally marry in 1816.
Edward and Jane Williams: Unmarried Couple, Probable Swingers
Frankenstein was published anonymously at first, then again in 1821 by “M.me Shelley”—a shocking abomination, to some, that a woman would write something so dark and grotesque. With Mary Shelley’s reputation at an all-time low, the entourage moved next to Italy. In a relatively small expat community, they met a couple about their age, Edward and Jane Williams. Like the Shelleys and company, their relationship was unconventional: “She’d left an abusive husband to be with Edward, so they weren’t actually married,” says Sampson. Also like many in the Shelleys’ cohort, the Williamses were already exiled—and therefore free to flaunt convention however they saw fit.
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