my childhood's companion and friend
Isabel Baxter became Mary's close
friend almost by accident. Mary's early adolescence had been troubled,
particularly fractious where her
stepmother was involved; and Godwin decided that some distance would
have a salutary effect on her rebelliousness. He contacted a radical
acquaintance from the 1790s, Richard Baxter, a Scotsman who was a good
friend of his own friend David Booth, who agreed to accept Mary into his
family in Dundee. There at the age of fourteen she took up a happy
residence that, as this account indicates, combined a closeness to nature
with a warm affection for the Baxters' middle daughter Isabel. With this
family she resided from June to November 1812, and from June 1813 to March 1814. Her elopement with the
married Percy Bysshe Shelley not
long after her return from this second
residence ruptured her friendship, since David Booth, who had married
Isabel in the meantime, refused to allow his wife to continue her intimacy
with a woman who had so abandoned customary propriety.
