Harriet Westbrook, who protested against a project of sending her back to school.  He counselled resistance.  She replied in July 1811 (to quote a contemporary letter from Shelley to Hogg), ’that resistance was useless, but that she would fly with me, and threw herself upon my protection.’  This was clearly a rather decided step upon the damsel’s part:  we may form our own conclusions whether she was willing to unite with Percy without the bond of marriage; or whether she confidently calculated upon inducing him to marry her, her family being kept in the dark; or whether the whole affair was a family manoeuvre for forcing on an engagement and a wedding.  Shelley returned to London, and had various colloquies with Harriet:  in due course he eloped with her to Edinburgh, and there on 28th August he married her.  His age was then just nineteen, and hers sixteen.  Shelley, who was a profound believer in William Godwin’s Political Justice, rejected the institution of marriage as being fundamentally irrational and wrongful.  But he saw that he could not in this instance apply his own pet theories without involving in discredit and discomfort the woman whose love had been bestowed upon him.  Either his opinion or her happiness must be sacrificed to what he deemed a prejudice of society:  he decided rather to sacrifice the former.

For two years, or up to an advanced date in 1813, the married life of Shelley and Harriet appears to have been a happy one, so far as their mutual relation was concerned; though rambling and scrambling, restricted by mediocrity of income (L400 a year, made up between the two fathers), and pestered by the continual, and to Percy at last very offensive, presence of Miss Westbrook as an inmate of the house.  They lived in York, Keswick in Cumberland, Dublin (which Shelley visited as an express advocate of Catholic emancipation and repeal of the Union), Nantgwillt in Radnorshire, Lynmouth in Devonshire, Tanyrallt in Carnarvonshire, London, Bracknell in Berkshire:  Ireland and Edinburgh were also revisited.  Various strange adventures befell; the oddest of all being an alleged attempt at assassination at Tanyrallt.  Shelley asserted it, others disbelieved it:  after much disputation the biographer supposes that, if not an imposture, it was a romance, and, if not a romance, at least a hallucination,—­Shelley, besides being wild in talk and wild in fancy, being by this time much addicted to laudanum-dosing.  In June 1813 Harriet gave birth, in London, to her first child, Ianthe Eliza (she married a Mr. Esdaile, and died in 1876).  About the same time Shelley brought out his earliest work of importance, the poem of Queen Mab:  its speculative audacities were too extreme for publication, so it was only privately printed.