Mary Jane Godwin

Mary Jane Godwin (née de Vial; best known as Clairmont; 1768 – 17 June 1841) was an English author, publisher, and bookseller. She was the second wife of William Godwin and stepmother to Mary Shelley. Early life Mary Jane de Vial was born in Exeter in 1768, probably the daughter of merchant Peter de Vial and his wife Mary (née Tremlett). Little is known about her early life, but she spoke several European languages and claimed to have travelled extensively on the Continent. In 1795, she was living in Bristol, a busy port city in south west England. There she bore her first child, Charles. Three years later at Brislington, a nearby village, she gave birth to a daughter she named Clara (in childhood known as Jane and in adulthood as Claire). To avoid these children bearing the social stigma of illegitimacy, she passed herself off as the widow of Charles Abram Marc Gaulis, "a merchant and member of a prominent Swiss family, whom she met in Cadiz". (His sister Albertina Mariana married Robert Trefusis, 17th Baron Clinton; both baron and baroness died in 1797-98.) She said that the Swiss merchant had anglicised his name upon settling in England, and so she and her children used the surname Clairmont. It appears that he was indeed the father of her first child, Charles Gaulis Clairmont, but there is no evidence that they ever married. In 2010, the father of her second child was discovered to be John Lethbridge (1746–1815, after 1804 Sir John Lethbridge, 1st Baronet) of Sandhill Park, near Taunton in Somerset. This discovery came through a trove of lawyers' letters, showing her making her case for child support payments. In 1799 and 1800 she was in debtors' prison in Ilchester.