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
The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley is an unfinished posthumous biography of the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley that was written by his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg. The first two of the four planned volumes were released in 1858 to largely unfavourable reviews. Though a few friends of Percy Shelley enjoyed the book, many critics attacked the book for being poorly edited and for portraying Shelley negatively. Though more volumes were planned, they were never published because of the Shelley family's objections to Hogg's treatment of him. Hogg had previously published "Shelley at Oxford"