Monsters of free love

In his New York Times Book Review piece on Daisy Hay's group biography of the English late Romantic poets (aptly titled The Young Romantics), Ben Downing takes a look at the complicated love affairs of Byron, the Shelleys, and the other English rebels of the time, including Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley's stepsister, who had this to say about the group's ethos:

"“Under the influence of the doctrine and belief of free love,” Clairmont states, “I saw the two first poets of England . . . become monsters of lying, meanness, cruelty and treachery — under the influence of free love Lord B became a human tyger slaking his thirst for inflicting pain upon defenceless women.”