28 August 1811: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Harriet Westbrook marry

In January 1811, fifteen-year-old Harriet Westbrook was attending Mrs Fenning’s boarding school in Clapham with classmates, sisters Mary and Hellen Shelley. When the sisters received a visit from their brother, eighteen-year-old Percy Bysshe Shelley, Hellen introduced them to each other, and the two began corresponding, encouraged by Harriet’s father and older sister.

A few months later Percy and Harriet eloped to Scotland just weeks after Harriet’s sixteenth and his nineteenth birthdays, and they were married under Scottish law on 28 August 1811 in the face of family opposition.

Harriet was intelligent, well-read, and charming, and as Shelley’s friend, Thomas Love Peacock wrote, “She had a good figure, light, active and graceful… The tone of her voice was pleasant; her speech the essence of frankness and cordiality… to be once in her company was to know her thoroughly.”

The couple criss-crossed England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland in pursuit of Percy’s various literary and political projects. Their daughter, Eliza Ianthe (known always by her middle name) was born on 23 June 1813. But by the end of that same year, Shelley was gone from home for long periods, and the marriage was in trouble. Regardless of this, in March 1814 the two were remarried in a London church to sanctify their union according to English law and prevent Ianthe from illegitimacy, although it appears that they intended to live separately. Harriet returned to her father, the mother of a daughter little more than a year old and pregnant with her second child. By the time Charles was born in November, his father had eloped a second time with another teenage girl and the two were far away on the Continent.

Harriet was married to Shelley for three years and he dedicated his first great poem, Queen Mab, to her. After their separation he continued to support her financially. On Sunday, 8 December 1816 Harriet’s dead body was found in the Serpentine Lake at the heart of Hyde Park with suicide being the most likely cause. She was twenty-one years old.