ein," daughter of
William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft; became the wife of the poet
Shelley in 1816 after a two years' illicit relationship; besides
"Frankenstein" (1828), wrote several romances, "The Last Man," "Lodore,"
&c., also "Rambles in Germany and Italy"; edited with valuable notes her
husband's works (1797-1851).

SHELLEY, PERCY BYSSHE, born at Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex,
eldest son of Sir Timothy Shelley, a wealthy landed proprietor; was
educated at Eton, and in 1810 went to Oxford, where his impatience of
control and violent heterodoxy of opinion, characteristic of him
throughout, burst forth in a pamphlet "The Necessity of Atheism," which
led to his expulsion in 1811, along with Jefferson Hogg, his subsequent
biographer; henceforth led a restless, wandering life; married at 19
Harriet Westbrook, a pretty girl of 16, a school companion of his sister,
from whom he was separated within three years; under the influence of
WILLIAM GODWIN (q. v.) his revolutionary ideas of politics and
society developed apace; engaged in quixotic political enterprises in
Dublin, Lynmouth, and elsewhere, and above all put to practical test
Godwin's heterodox view on marriage by eloping (1814) to the Continent
with his daughter Mary, whom he married two years later after the
unhappy suicide of Harriet; in 1816, embittered by lord Eldon's decision
that he was unfit to be trusted with the care of Harriet's children, and
with consumption threatening, he left England never to return; spent the
few remaining years of his life in Italy, chiefly at Lucca, Florence, and
Pisa, in friendly relations with Byron, Leigh Hunt, Trelawney, &c.;
during this time were written his greatest works, "Prometheus Unbound,"
"The Cenci," his noble lament on Keats, "Adonais," besides other longer
works, and most of his finest lyrics, "Ode to the South Wind," "The
Skylark," &c.; was drowned while returning in an open sailing-boat from
Leghorn to his home on Spezia Bay; "An enthusiast for humanity
generally," says Professor Saintsbury, "and towards individuals a man of
infinite generosity and kindliness, he yet did some of the cruellest and
some of not the least disgraceful things from mere childish want of
realising the _pacta conventa_ of the world;" Shelley is pre-eminently
the poet of lyric emotion, the subtle and most musical interpreter of
vague spiritual longing and intellectual desire; his poems form together
"the most sensitive," says Stopfo