In 1814, as Harriet expected a second child, the marriage collapsed and Shelley eloped to France with the sixteen-year-old Mary Godwin and (surprisingly) her fifteen-year-old stepsister Claire. It shows the influence of the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft (author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women) and of William Godwin, both of whom he soon met, along with their daughter, Mary. They married in Edinburgh in 1811.ĭuring a restless and nomadic existence for the next three years, Shelley wrote ‘Queen Mab’ (1813) which reflects Shelley’s revolutionary instincts and his republicanism, belief in free love, vegetarianism and atheism. Immediately, he eloped to Scotland with Harriet Westbrook, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a coffee-house proprietor. The expulsion from Oxford led to a violent quarrel with his father and was the first step in the sense of exile which pursued Shelley throughout his life. Shelley was educated at Eton, where he was known as ‘Mad Shelley’, and University College Oxford, from where he was expelled for co-authoring a pamphlet entitled ‘The Necessity of Atheism’ and refusing to answer when asked whether he had written it. Shelley was born at Field Place, near Horsham, the eldest son of Sir Timothy Shelley, MP for the Duke of Norfolk’s pocket borough of Shoreham-by-sea.
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