Field Place, Sussex, and a Storm at Sea (AW2)

This comfortable English country house, Field Place, near Horsham in West Sussex was the family seat of the Shelleys. It was in this unlikely aristocratic setting for a future social and political radical that Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was born, in 1792. As an adult the rebellious Shelley, friend of Byron and Leigh Hunt, was estranged from his family and rarely visited his childhood home. His second wife, Mary, was the author of Frankenstein. All his life Shelley had an affinity with water and boats - rowing, sailing, even paper boats. In 1822, less than a month before his thirtieth birthday, he drowned in a sudden storm while sailing off the coast of Italy.