I love reading about radicals who think they know what's best for the world, reject religion and all traditional morality, and yet never recognize their own nastiness. Shelley is a very good example of this, and this review of a new book about him has plenty of examples of his unpleasantness.
I suppose his first wife (aged 16) didn't fully appreciate his attitude to marriage:
When Harriet Westbrook, in rebellion against her father and her school, begged Shelley to rescue her, it was the kind of cause that he found hard to resist. He agreed to elope with a girl he had never considered more than a friend. “If I know anything about love, I am not in love,” he had written just weeks before the marriage. He loved the idea of getting married even less: “A kind of ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most despotic, most unrequired fetter.” But he recognized that living together out of wedlock would hurt Harriet’s reputation much more than his own, and he agreed to go through with the ceremony.A child or two later he subsequently fell in love with another 16 year old:
....in the summer of 1814, Shelley fell in love with Mary Godwin. Mary was then sixteen, the same age that Harriet had been when Shelley married her, and she had intellectual gifts that Harriet could never match. Just as important was her intellectual pedigree: she was the daughter of William Godwin, a radical thinker whom Shelley worshipped, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the crusader for women’s rights. Add the fact that Mary was instantly smitten with Shelley—it seems that they had sex for the first time by her mother’s grave, to mark their spiritual union—and Harriet never really had a chance.There is a lot more detail in the review.
I had read about his life somewhere before, but it's good to be reminded about this sort of stuff.
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