Shelley, Percy Bysshe and Mary Wollstonecraft

(1792-1851)

   • Percy Bysshe, the husband, 1792-1822

   Born at Field Place, Warnham, near Horsham, to a wealthy, aristocratic family, he was educated at Sion House Academy, Brentford, Essex, Eton College, and Oxford University, from which he was expelled in 1811 for co-writing The Necessity of Atheismё a pamphlet of which the university authorities disapproved. He married Harriet Westbrook soon afterward and moved to the Lake District of England. In 1814, after separating from Harriet, he eloped with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin to the Continent (she was seventeen), where they lived a bohemian lifestyle that included John Keats and Lord Byron (see entries). They married in 1816 soon after Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine Lake in Kensington Gardens. Shelley drowned in a storm at sea off Italy; his body was washed ashore ten days later, and he was buried in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome. He is memorialized by a tablet in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. Shelley has gone down in history as one of England's greatest poets for his sonnets, short, powerful poems, love lyrics, verse dramas and tragedies, as well as several prose works and translations. Some of his poems: "To a Skylark," "Ode to the West Wind," "The Cloud," "Peter Bell the Third," "The Boat on the Serchio," "To Mary Shelley," "To William Shelley," "Tribute to America," "Verses on a Cat."

   • Mary Wollstonecraft, the wife, 1797-1851

   Mary's parents were the novelist and political philosopher William Godwin (1756-1836) and the author and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (17591797), who died within days of Mary's birth. Following her first novel, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818) she went on to publish five more novels. She spent much time editing and annotating her late husband's work, but owing to father-inlaw's opposition, she was unable to publish Poetical Works until 1839. To finance her son's private education, she wrote essays and short fiction for periodicals. Between 1835 and 1838 she produced a series of scholarly biographies. The death of her fatherin-law, Sir Timothy Shelley, in 1844 provided financial security, and her son inherited the title. She died in Chester Square, London, and was interred in the churchyard at Bournemouth. Some of her poems: "Oh Listen While I Sing to Thee," "On Reading Wordsworth's Lines on Peele Castle," "Stanzas," "To the air of 'My Phillida, adieu, love!'"

   Sources: America in Poetry. Charles Sullivan, ed. Harry N. Abrams, 1988. Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Encyclopædia Britannica. Electronic Edition, 2006. English Poetry: Author Search. Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1995 (http://www.lib.utexas.edu:8080/search/epoetry/author.html). Love's Witness: Five Centuries of Love Poetry by Women. Jill Hollis, ed. Carroll and Graf, Inc., 1993. Microsoft Encarta 2006 (DVD). Microsoft Corporation, 2006. Poets of the English Language, Vol. IV. W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson, eds. Viking Press, 1950. Romanticism. Duncan Wu, ed. Blackwell, 1994. The Cherry-Tree. Geoffrey Grigson, ed. Phoenix House, 1959. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mary Shelley, ed. The Modern Library, 1994. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. The Sophisticated Cat: A Gathering of Stories, Poems, and Miscellaneous Writings About Cats. Joyce Oates, Carol and Daniel Halpern, eds. Penguin Books, 1992.