In the early months after Mary Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley returned to England
they were both afflicted with the deaths of women with whom their lives were closely
interknit. On 9 October 1816 Fanny Godwin, Mary's half-sister, committed suicide.
A month later Harriet Shelley, P. B. Shelley's legal wife, drowned herself in the
Serpentine River in Hyde Park. Those experiences would appear to be registered in
this elegiac paragraph.