Percy Bysshe Shelley October. On 10December 1816 the body of Shelley's estranged wife Harriet was found in an advanced state of pregnancy, drowned in the Serpentine in Hyde Park, London. Shelley had made generous provision for Harriet and their children in his will and had paid her a monthly allowance as had her father. It is thought that Harriet, who had left her children with her sister Eliza and had been living alone under the name of Harriet Smith, mistakenly believed herself to have been abandoned by her new lover, 36-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Maxwell, who had been deployed abroad, after a landlady
Percy Bysshe Shelley Bysshe Shelley: A Biography". The rediscovery in mid-2006 of Shelley's long-lost "Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things", as noted above, was slow to be followed up until the only known surviving copy was acquired by the Bodleian Library in Oxford as its 12-millionth book in November 2015 and made available online. An analysis of the poem by the only person known to have examined the whole work at the time of the original discovery appeared in the "Times Literary Supplement": H. R. Woudhuysen, "Shelley's Fantastic Prank", 12 July 2006. In 2007 John Lauritsen published "The Man Who Wrote