When the rakish poet Percy Bysshe Shelley charms his way into the sheltered lives of three sisters, calamity follows.  Fanny, the eldest at nineteen, is sent away to recover from her broken heart, while Mary and Claire, both sixteen, run away with the married Shelley.  The Poet sees himself as the savior of young women, even as he seals Fanny’s doom, steals Mary’s heart, and offers Claire a nomadic existence. To remain in Percy and Mary’s bright orbit, Claire Clairmont becomes a muse to Shelley, a lover to the great Lord Byron, and a witness to Mary’s creation of Frankenstein. And yet, once pregnant with Byron’s child, Claire has no voice in determining her own future. In Our Hands Are Pale as Milk, Claire at last relates her story of love and suffering at the hands of poets Shelley and Byron. Hers is a cautionary tale for all women who fall in love.

Author: Sara Kay Rupnik
Paperback: 264 pages
Literature | Novel
ISBN-13: 9781947175747

A native of Western Pennsylvania, Sara Kay Rupnik now lives in Brunswick, Georgia, and Concord, New Hampshire.  Her short fiction was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and short-listed for the Sean O’Faolain Short Story Prize.  Her story collection, Women Longing to Fly (Mayapple Press, 2015) was a finalist for Georgia Author of the Year Award.  She holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College and teaches Creative Writing for the Jekyll Island Arts Association and GoodLife in Concord.

“With empathetic imagination, Sara Kay Rupnik raises Claire Clairmont from two centuries as a scandalous footnote in the biographies of celebrated writers to the heights of a complex woman who claims full agency, freely owning a lifetime of choices spurred by her romantic idealism, her romantic blindness; her passions, her jealousies; her desires and regrets; her elevating gifts and wrenching losses.”

 —Nancy Jensen, author of In Our Midst and The Sisters

“#Them, too: English Romanticism’s opulent language, passionate amours, and enchanting landscapes weren’t just imaginary. Our Hands Are Pale As Milk transports readers into the tangled lives from which the literature sprang, lives and scandals that rival today’s.”

 —Deirdra McAfee, co-editor of Lock & Load: Armed Fiction