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
Shelley: A Life Story he lived and the mass of material about him." The gay scholar John Lauritsen, writing in "The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein" (2007), called Blunden's book the best life of Shelley, commenting that Blunden "brings a poet's understanding to Shelley's life and poetry." Shelley: A Life Story Shelley: A Life Story is a 1946 biography of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley by Edmund Blunden. The work was favorably reviewed and has been called the best life of Shelley. "Shelley: A Life Story" received a positive review in "Time" magazine in 1947. The reviewer noted that the book had been "greeted in