A pregnant Mary Shelley had moved in…

A pregnant Mary Shelley had moved in the summer of 1822 with her husband Percy, Claire Clairmont, and Edward and Jane Williams, to the isolated Villa Magni, at the sea's edge near the hamlet of San Terenzo in the Bay of Lerici.

Once they were settled in, Percy had broken the "evil news" to Claire that her daughter Allegra had died of typhus in a convent at Bagnacavallo.

Mary Shelley is distracted and unhappy in the cramped and remote Villa Magni, which she has come to regard as a dungeon.

On June 16, she had miscarried, losing so much blood that she nearly died.

Rather than wait for a doctor, Percy had sat her in a bath of ice to staunch the bleeding, an act the doctor will later tell him had saved her life.

All is not well between the couple this summer, however, and Percy spends more time with Jane Williams than with his depressed and debilitated wife.

Most of the short poems Shelley writes at San Terenzo are addressed to Jane rather than to Mary.

The coast offers Percy Shelley and Edward Williams the chance to enjoy their "perfect plaything for the summer", a new sailing boat.

The boat had been designed by Daniel Roberts and Edward Trelawny, an admirer of Byron's who had joined the party in January 1822.

On July 1, 1822, Percy Shelley, Edward Ellerker Williams, and Captain Daniel Roberts sail south down the coast to Livorno, where Percy Shelley discusses with Byron and Leigh Hunt the launch of a radical magazine called The Liberal.

On 8 July, he and Edward Williams set out on the return journey to Lerici with their eighteen-year-old boatboy, Charles Vivian.

They never reach their destination.

A letter arrives at Villa Magni from Hunt to Percy Shelley, dated July 8, saying, "pray write to tell us how you got home, for they say you had bad weather after you sailed monday & we are anxious".

"The paper fell from me," Mary told a friend later.

"I trembled all over. (Letter to Maria Gisborne, 15 August 1815, Selected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Ed. Betty T. Bennett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, p. 99.)

She and Jane Williams rush desperately to Livorno and then to Pisa in the fading hope that their husbands are still alive.

Ten days after the storm, three bodies wash up on the coast near Viareggio, midway between Livorno and Lerici.

Edward Trelawny, Lord Byron, and Leigh Hunt cremate Percy Shelley’s corpse on the beach at Viareggio.