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
Edward Bysshe (writer) Edward Bysshe (writer) Edward Bysshe (fl. 1712) was an English writer, remembered for his popular guide "The Art of Poetry" from 1702. While not respectable as a manual on verse-writing, it was used by leading authors. Bysshe's background is unclear. The "Oxford Dictionary of National Biography" suggests that either Henry Bysshe of Buxted or George Bysshe of Burstow might be his father. He worked as a hack writer in London. "The Art of English Poetry" (1702) is dedicated to Edmund Dunch and consists of three sections: The work was popular: a fifth edition was issued in 1714; a seventh, "corrected