Eliza Westbrook's guest appearances

Eliza Westbrook

The Bodleian Libraries (BODcasts)

Shelley's Ghost: Reshaping the Image of a Literary Family

William Godwin

John Keats

Mary Wollstonecraft

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Mary Shelley

Harriet Shelley

Colin Dexter

John Johnson

Brian Sewell

Lord Owen

Jim Callaghan

Robert Harley

Earl of Oxford

Samson Agonistes

Osip Mandelshtam

OwlTail

Part of the Shelley's Ghost Exhibition. Harriet Shelley drowned herself in December 1816, aged twenty-one. Her body was recovered from the Serpentine on 10 December, and an inquest into the death of one 'Harriet Smith' was held the following day. Although her precise movements in the months leading up to her death are uncertain, it is clear that she was living away from home, that she had taken a lover, and that she was pregnant. This is Harriet's last letter. Muddled and full of self-recrimination, it reveals the nervous exhaustion and profound depression of her final days.

Harriet Shelley - Letter to Eliza Westbrook, Shelley and her parents 