1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. After 25 Mar 1811. [her future husband] Shelley and Hogg came up to London, where Shelley was soon left alone, as his friend went to York to study conveyancing. Percy and his incensed father did not at once come to terms and for a while he had no resource beyond pocket-money saved up by his sisters (four in number altogether) and sent round to him, sometimes by the hand of a singularly pretty school-fellow, Miss Harriet Westbrook, daughter of a retired and moderately rich hotel-keeper. Shelley, in early youth, had a somewhat "priggish" turn for moralizing and argumentation, and a decided mania for proselytizing; his school-girl sisters, and their little Methodist friend Miss Westbrook, aged between fifteen and sixteen, must all be enlightened and converted to anti-Christianity. He therefore cultivated the society of Harriet, calling at the house of her father, and being encouraged in his assiduity by her much older sister Eliza. Harriet not unnaturally fell in love with him; and he, though not it would seem at any time ardently in love with her, dallied along the Bowery pathway which leads to sentiment and a definite courtship. This was not his first love-affair; for he had but a very few months before been courting his cousin Miss Harriet Grove, who, alarmed at his heterodoxies, finally broke off with him - to his no small grief and perturbation at the time. It is averred, and seemingly with truth, that Shelley never indulged in any sensual or dissipated amour; and, as he advances in life, it becomes apparent that, though capable of the passion of love, and unusually prone to regard with much effusion of sentiment women who interested his mind and heart, the mere attraction of a pretty face or an alluring figure left him unenthralled.

1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. After Aug 1811. Harriet Shelley was not only beautiful; she was amiable, accommodating, adequately well educated and well bred. She liked reading, and her reading was not strictly frivolous. But she could not (as [her future husband] Shelley said at a later date) "feel poetry and understand philosophy." Her attractions were all on the surface; there was (to use a common phrase) "nothing particular in her." For nearly three years Shelley and she led a shifting sort of life upon an income of £400 a year, one-half of which was allowed (after his first severe indignation at the mésalliance was past) by Mr [her future father-in-law] Timothy Shelley (age 57), and the other half by Mr Westbrook. The couple left Edinburgh for York and the society of Hogg; broke with him upon a charge made by Harriet, and evidently fully believed by Shelley at the time, that, during a temporary absence of his upon business in Sussex, Hogg had tried to seduce her (this quarrel was entirely made up at the end of about a year); moved off to Keswick in Cumberland, where they received kind attentions from Southey (age 36), and some hospitality from the duke of Norfolk (age 65), who, as chief magnate in the Shoreham region of Sussex, was at pains to reconcile the father and his too unfilial heir;

1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. Here, in June 1813, Harriet gave birth to her daughter [her daughter] Ianthe Eliza (she married a Mr Esdaile, and died in 1876). Here also [her husband] Shelley brought out his first poem of any importance, Queen Mab; it was privately printed, as its exceedingly aggressive tone in matters of religion and morals would not allow of publication. In July the Shelleys took a house at Bracknell near Windsor Forest, where they had congenial neighbours, Mrs Boinville and her family.

1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. It was towards May 1814 that [her husband] Shelley first saw Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (age 16) as a grown-up girl (she was well on towards seventeen); he instantly fell in love with her, and she with him. Just before this, on the 24th of March, Shelley had remarried Harriet in London, apparently with a view to strengthening his position in his relations with his father as to the family property; but, on becoming enamoured of Mary, he seems to have rapidly made up his mind that Harriet should not stand in the way. She was at Bath while he was in London. They had, however, met again in London and come to some sort of understanding before the final crisis arrived-Harriet remonstrating and indignant, but incapable of effective resistance-Shelley sick of her companionship, and bent upon gratifying his own wishes, which as we have already seen were not at odds with his avowed principles of conduct. For some months past there had been bickering's and misunderstandings between him and Harriet, aggravated by the now detested presence of Miss Westbrook in the house; more than this cannot be said, and it seems dubious whether more will be hereafter known. Shelley, and not he alone, alleged grave misdoing on Harriet's part - perhaps mistakenly.

1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. Sep 1816. The return of the [her former husband] Shelleys was closely followed by two suicides - first that of Fanny Wollstonecraft (already referred to), and second that of Harriet Shelley, who on the 9th of November drowned herself in the Serpentine. The body was not found until the 10th of December. The latest stages of the lovely and ill-starred Harriet's career have never been very explicitly recorded. It seems that she formed a connexion with some gentleman from whom circumstances or desertion separated her, that her habits became intemperate, and that she was treated with contumelious harshness by her sister during an illness of their father. She had always had a propensity (often laughed at in earlier and happier days) to the idea of suicide, and she now carried it out in act-possibly without anything which could be regarded as an extremely cogent predisposing motive, although the total weight of her distresses, accumulating within the past two years and a half, was beyond question heavy to bear. Shelley, then at Bath, hurried up to London when he heard of Harriet's death, giving manifest signs of the shock which so terrible a catastrophe had produced on him. Some self-reproach must no doubt have mingled with his affliction and dismay; yet he does not appear to have considered himself gravely in the wrong at any stage in the transaction, and it is established that in the train of quite recent events which immediately led up to Harriet's suicide he had borne no part. This was the time when Shelley began to see a great ideal of Leigh Hunt, the poet and essayist, editor of the Examiner; they were close friends, and Hunt did something to uphold the reputation of Shelley as a poet-which, we may here say once for all, scarcely obtained any public acceptance or solidity during his brief lifetime.