As I discussed in the first blog post in this series about Percy Bysshe Shelley, not long before his death, the poet told his cousin and Lord Byron that he'd been pursued by a beautiful lady. Here is a synopsis from an early biography:
"According to the account which Shelley gave to Byron and Medwin, he re-encountered in Naples the married lady who had proffered her love to him in 1816. She... informed him of the persistent though hopeless affection with which she had tracked his footsteps." -- A Memoir of Shelley, by William Michael Rossetti, (1886)

   Whether or not there really was a mysterious lady, there was a mysterious baby girl.
  Something—nobody knows what exactly—happened in Naples in the winter of 1818 concerning Shelley and a baby girl. There is some question about how much of the whole story Mary Shelley ever knew, and she later suppressed the few details that were available.
   During the winter of 1818/19 Shelley was living in Naples with his wife (Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein,) his wife's step-sister Claire, who was possibly pregnant, and a pregnant nursemaid. By the time he left Naples in February, he had taken financial responsibility for a new-born baby girl...
  

After traipsing around Italy, Percy Bysshe Shelley, his wife Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her step-sister Claire Clairmont rented a villa in the spa town of Bagni di Lucca in the summer of 1818. They lived there with their little son, baby daughter, and some servants. This was a very young household: Mary Shelley was 20, her husband a few years older.
   In mid-August, Shelley and Claire abruptly left for Venice. Claire was anxious to see her little daughter Allegra, the result of a brief and one-sided fling with Lord Byron.
​   Claire had unhappily and unwillingly given custody of the baby to Byron. She was essentially destitute, he was rich; she was obscure, he was famous, she trusted he could give the child a better life and she was grateful he acknowledged paternity. Mary Shelley generously gave up her children’s Swiss nurse-maid so Allegra could have a familiar face taking care of her when she was sent to a father she'd never known...

​My first in a series of posts about Percy Bysshe Shelley examined a curious story that Shelley told several of his intimate friends: he claimed a beautiful lady threw herself at him in London and followed him through Europe. Shelley biographers take the tale with a giant grain of salt, and I make use of it in my forthcoming novel, A Different Kind of Woman.
   According to Shelley, the mysterious lady was the pursuer, it was she who adored him. This notion of being the one pursued recurs in Shelley's retrospective descriptions of the important relationships in his life. 
    One undeniable fact about Shelley was that he had a tendency to fall violently, passionately in love, and to persuade himself that the object of his adoration was the sum total of human perfection. As Paul Johnson wrote in Intellectuals: “Shelley's love was deep, sincere, passionate, and indeed everlasting, but it was always changing its object.”
   He was very fond of his first wife, the tragic Harriet Westbrook. “My wife is the partner of my thoughts and feelings,” he wrote in a letter to his mentor, William Godwin. Then he fell for Godwin's daughter. After he left Harriet he blamed her older sister for pressuring him into marriage.  
   Shelley claimed that Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, then 16, practically gave herself to him in front of her mother's grave. (William Powell Frith's 1877 portrait shows a demure, Victorian-style Mary).
   On the other hand, Mary's step-mother said Shelley burst into the Godwin home on Skinner Street with a gun and a bottle of laudanum, threatening to kill himself.
​   I hypothesize, therefore, if there really was a mysterious lady, it might have been Shelley who became enamoured of her, not the other way around, and when he confessed the story to his friend Medwin, he shifted all responsibility for the affair from him to her, as was his pattern...

     A Different Kind of Woman, the final book of my Mansfield Trilogy is on its way! I’ll announce the publication date soon.
    My story blends actual events and real people with the characters from Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and I'm excited (and a little bit nervous) about sending it out into the world!

    Leading up to the publication of A Different Kind of Woman, I’ll be posting some background information about the people and events in the novel. Here's the first of a series about the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who plays an important part in A Different Kind of Woman. There are some intriguing biographical mysteries around Shelley’s life which I have woven into my novel. ​​
​   Percy Bysshe Shelley was the archetype of the bohemian poet with his unruly flowing locks and his open-necked collar. His disregard for social convention often caused him (and others) grief. For example, he was kicked out of Oxford for writing a pamphlet about atheism, he eloped at 19, and a few years later, left his first wife to elope with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.
    As Shelley biographer Richard Holmes notes: “It was ironic that the result of [Shelley's] efforts to liberate himself and those around him from the trammels of morality and society” resulted in “an almost total entrapment in the complications of his daily existence.” 
    One of the complications of his life involved a mysterious woman. Or did she even exist?