Percy Florence Shelley Bysshe Shelley, his namesake, and his wife author Mary Shelley. His elder siblings, consisting of a premature girl who died at few weeks old and a brother and a sister who died in childhood left him as the only surviving child as his mother suffered a miscarriage in 1822. His parents lived in Italy for several years, until his father drowned off Livorno, whereupon his mother moved back to England with him. Mary Shelley never remarried; Percy Florence had no further siblings. He joined Harrow School in 1832, and went up to Trinity College, Cambridge in October 1837. Shelley inherited
Percy Bysshe Shelley Fanny Imlay and Claire Clairmont, were his adopted step-daughters. Godwin's first wife, the celebrated feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, author of "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman", had died shortly after giving birth to Godwin's biological daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, named after her mother. Fanny was the illegitimate daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and her lover, the diplomat speculator and writer, Gilbert Imlay. Claire was the illegitimate daughter of Godwin's much younger second wife, Mary Jane Clairmont Godwin, whom Shelley considered a vulgar woman—"not a proper person to form the mind of a young girl", he is supposed to have said—and Sir