Claire Clairmont

Mary Godwin's loss of her child had induced acute depression: she had been haunted by visions of the baby, but she conceived again and had recovered by the summer of 1815.

With a revival in Percy Shelley's finances after the death of his grandfather, Sir Bysshe Shelley, the couple had vacationed in Torquay, then rented a two-story cottage at Bishopsgate, on the edge of Windsor Great Park.

Little is known about this period in Mary Godwin's life, since her journal from May 1815 to July 1816 is lost.

At Bishopsgate, Percy had written his poem Alastor; and on January 24, 1816, Mary had given birth to a second child, William, named after her father and soon nicknamed "Willmouse".

In her novel The Last Man, she later imagines Windsor as a Garden of Eden.

In May 1816, Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, and their son travel to Geneva with her stepsister Claire Clairmont.

They plan to spend the summer with the poet Lord Byron, whose recent affair with Claire has left her pregnant.

Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin, and Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, with whom Lord Byron had had an affair in London, had arrived at Geneva on May 14, 1816, where Mary calls herself "Mrs. Shelley".

Byron and his personal physician, the young, brilliant, handsome John Polidori, had joined them on May 25, and rented the Villa Diodati, close to Lake Geneva at the village of Cologny; Percy Shelley had rented a smaller building called Maison Chapuis on the waterfront nearby.

They spend their time writing, boating on the lake, and talking late into the night.

Among other subjects, the conversation had turned to the experiments of the eighteenth-century natural philosopher and poet Erasmus Darwin, who was said to have animated dead matter, and to galvanism and the feasibility of returning a corpse or assembled body parts to life.

Sitting around a log fire at Byron's villa, the company also amuse themselves by reading German ghost stories, prompting Byron to suggest they each write their own supernatural tale.

Shortly afterwards, in a waking dream, Mary Godwin had conceived the idea for Frankenstein.

She has begun writing what she assumes will be a short story.

With Percy Shelley's encouragement, she will expand this tale into her first novel, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus.

Byron had written and quickly abandoned) a fragment of a story, "Fragment of a Novel", about the main character Augustus Darvell, which Polidori will later use as the basis for his own tale, "The Vampyre", the first vampire story published in English.

Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley, on their return to England in September, had moved—with Claire Clairmont, who takes lodgings nearby—to Bath, where they had hoped to keep Claire’s pregnancy secret.

At Cologny, Mary had received two letters from her half-sister, Fanny Imlay, who had alluded to her "unhappy life"; on October 9, Fanny had written an "alarming letter" from Bristol that had sent Percy Shelley racing off to search for her, without success.

On the morning of October 10, Fanny Imlay was found dead in a room at a Swansea inn, along with a suicide note and a laudanum bottle.

On December 10, Percy Shelley's wife, Harriet, is discovered drowned in the Serpentine, a lake in Hyde Park, London.

Both suicides are hushed up.

Harriet’s family obstructs Percy Shelley's efforts—fully supported by Mary Godwin—to assume custody of his two children by Harriet.

His lawyers advise him to improve his case by marrying; so he and Mary, who is pregnant again, marry on December 30, 1816 at St. Mildred's Church, Bread Street, London.

Mr. and Mrs. Godwin are present and the marriage ends the family rift.

Percy Shelley often lives away from home in London to evade creditors during  autumn 1817.

Claire Clairmont had given birth to a baby girl on January 13, at first called Alba, later Allegra.

In March of this year, the Chancery Court had ruled Percy Shelley morally unfit to assume custody of his children and later placed them with a clergyman's family.

Also in March, the Shelleys had moved with Claire and Alba to Albion House at Marlow, Buckinghamshire, a large, damp building on the river Thames.

Here Mary Shelley give birth to her third child, Clara, on 2 September.

At Marlow, they entertained their new friends Marianne and Joseph Henry Leigh Hunt, work hard at their writing, and often discussed politics.

At Marlow, Mary edits the joint journal of the group's 1814 Continental journey, adding material written in Switzerland in 1816, along with Percy's poem "Mont Blanc".

The result is the History of a Six Weeks' Tour, published in November 1817.

One of the Shelley party's first tasks on arriving in Italy had been to hand the child Alba over to Lord Byron, who was living in Venice.

He had agreed to raise her so long as her mother Claire, Mary Shelley’s stepsister, has nothing more to do with her.

The Shelleys had then embarked on a roving existence, never settling in any one place for long.

Along the way, they have accumulated a circle of friends and acquaintances who often move with them.

The couple devotes their time to writing, reading, learning, sightseeing, and socializing.

The Italian adventure is, however, blighted for Mary Shelley by the deaths of both her childre—Clara, in September 1818 in Venice, and William, in June 1819 in Rome.

These losses leave her in a deep depression that has isolated her from Percy Shelley.

For a time, Mary Shelley finds comfort only in her writing.

The birth of her fourth child, Percy Florence, on November 12, 1819, had finally lifted her spirits, though she will nurse the memory of her lost children until the end of her life.

Italy has provided the Shelleys, Byron, and other exiles with a political freedom unattainable at home.

Despite its associations with personal loss, Italy has become for Mary Shelley "a country which memory painted as paradise".

Their Italian years are a time of intense intellectual and creative activity for both Shelleys.

While Percy composes a series of major poems, Mary writes the autobiographical novel Matilda,the historical novel Valperga, and the plays Proserpine and Midas.

Mary had written Valperga to help alleviate her father's financial difficulties, as Percy had refused to assist him further.

She is often physically ill, however, and prone to depressions.

She also has had to cope with Percy’s interest in other women, such as Sophia Stacey, Emilia Viviani, and Jane Williams.

Since Mary Shelley shares his belief in the non-exclusivity of marriage, she has formed emotional ties of her own among the men and women of their circle.

She has become particularly fond of the Greek revolutionary Prince Alexander Mavrocordato and of Jane and Edward Williams.

In December 1818, the Shelleys had traveled south with Claire Clairmont and their servants to Naples, where they had stayed for three months, receiving only one visitor, a physician.

In 1820, they find themselves plagued by accusations and threats from Paolo and Elise Foggi, former servants whom Percy Shelley had dismissed in Naples shortly after the Foggis had married.

The pair have revealed that on February 27, 1819 in Naples, Percy Shelley had registered as his child by Mary Shelley a two-month-old baby girl named Elena Adelaide Shelley.

The Foggis also claim that Claire Clairmont is the baby's mother.

Biographers have offered various interpretations of these events: that Percy Shelley decided to adopt a local child; that the baby was his by Elise, Claire, or an unknown woman; or that she was Elise’s by Byron.

Mary Shelley insists she would have known if Claire had been pregnant, but it is unclear how much she really knew.

The events in Naples, a city Mary Shelley later called a paradise inhabited by devils, remain shrouded in mystery.

The only certainty is that she herself is not the child’s mother.

Elena Adelaide Shelley dies in Naples on June 9, 1820.

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.