by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792 at Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, into a conservative landowning aristocratic family, but most of his writing was devoted to spreading his vision of a free-thinking, universal brotherhood. He attended Oxford University but was expelled for publishing The Necessity of Atheism. In 1811 he married Harriet Westbrook, with whom he had two children. He published his first long Radical poem, Queen Mab, in 1813. Involved in Radical political activities in Ireland and then Wales, he fled Wales for London in 1813. Here he met the well-known, liberal social philosopher William Godwin, and also Godwin’s daughter, Mary, whose mother was the famed feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (see Vindication of the Rights of Woman, also in WLAIT 3: British and Irish Literature and Its Times). Mary Godwin and Shelley became a couple...