28 July 1814: Percy Bysshe Shelley elopes with Mary Godwin

After Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in 1822, Mary Shelley edited and published several volumes of his work. She also wrote his biography, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, which is still considered one of the most important works of Shelley scholarship. [1]

During the night of 28 July 1814, a 16-year-old English girl ran away with an obscure poet 5 years older than her, the two of them fleeing across the English Channel to France. The young man, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who became a celebrated Romantic poet after his death, was already married.

His lover, Mary Godwin, later wrote Frankenstein, one of the most famous novels of all time.

Earlier that year, Shelley had begun visiting his mentor William Godwin, soon falling in love with Godwin’s 16-year-old daughter, Mary. In June, the lovers declared their love other during a visit to her mother’s grave site (Mary Wollstonecraft, who had died 11 days after giving birth to Mary). When Shelley told William Godwin that he intended to leave his wife and live with Mary, the father banished him from the house and forbade Mary from seeing him.

Shelley and Mary took things into their own hands and eloped to Europe, taking Mary’s step-sister Claire Clairmont with them. The trio made their way across war-ravaged France, Germany and Holland, but lack of money forced them to turn back and they arrived in England in September 1814. Two years later in December 1816, Shelley’s estranged wife, Harriet, drowned herself. Despite philosophical objections to the institution, Mary and Shelley subsequently married the same year.

In March 1818 the Shelleys and Claire again left England for the benefit of Percey’s health and to escape its “tyranny, civil and religious.” They lived mostly in Europe until 1822 when Percy drowned in a boating accident. A widow at 24, Mary returned to London with her one surviving son where she continued to write and edit novels, travelogues and poetry until her own death in 1851, aged 53.