Percy and Mary Shelley were married in St Mildred's Church in London on 30 December, 1816, and were welcomed back into the family fold. Their relationship thus far had been more to Percy's liking than Mary's. While they had both bought into William Godwin's philosophies of free love and the concept of an open marriage, Mary found this particularly difficult in practice. Before their marriage she had been coerced into a liaison with Percy's boyhood friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg and Percy himself had enjoyed the charms of Mary's step-sister Jane, but overall Mary remained unconvinced of the joys of sharing herself and her partner.

The newly-wed Mary and Percy Shelley spent the first weeks of their marriage living with family. During this time the other woman in their relationship, Jane, or Claire as she was by then known, was living at their home in Bath . There she gave birth on 12 January, 1817, to the daughter of Lord Byron , her estranged lover. Claire had kept the pregnancy secret, such was her