Author: Shelley, Hellen
Biography:
SHELLEY, Hellen (1799-1885: ancestry.com)
It is most unlikely that Hellen Shelley was the author going by “F. H. S-----y” as one of the contributors to Tunbridge Wells (1817) but the work has been attributed to her and therefore she is included here. She is not known ever to have published anything else though she did write poetry as a child. She was baptised at Warnham, Sussex, on 6 Nov. 1799, the fourth of six surviving children of Sir Timothy Shelley, baronet (1753-1844), and his wife Elizabeth Pilfold (1762-1846) and younger sister of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Elizabeth Shelley, qq.v. In later life she recalled Percy’s having arranged for the printing of a small volume of verse by the two of them which he later had “bought up and destroyed” (Cameron 301-2); unlike his joint venture with Elizabeth, no physical evidence survived. She never married, and after the deaths of her parents lived with her younger unmarried sister Margaret (1801-87) first at Elcot(t) House in Kintbury, Berkshire, with ten servants (census 1851-71) then at Tanbridge Court, Godstone, Surrey (census 1881), where she died on 10 May 1885. In her will she left her personal estate, valued at just under £6300, to her sister as sole executrix. (ancestry.com 19 Oct. 2024; findmypast.com 19 Oct. 2024; Kenneth Neill Cameron, Young Shelley [1950])