His relations with women have been much criticised and also much misunderstood. The first thing unusual about his life is the slight influence his mother exerted upon him. Shelley, no doubt, loved his mother, but he received very little sympathy from her. As a result he became strongly attached to his sisters; in them he sought unconsciously for the mother he had all but lost. He was alienated from his father in boyhood, and there were definite clashes later. The poet was the oldest of six children. He loved his cousin, Harriet Grove, and was engaged to her. She broke the engagement on account of the views he entertained. Her parents influenced her in this action. It was Shelley's first love affair. The poet was in his nineteenth year when he was jilted; he slept with a loaded pistol and poison near him for some time after this. In January, 1811, in a letter to his friend, Hogg, he writes he would have followed Harriet to the end of the earth. He asks his friend never to mention her. He tells of a personal interview with Harriet and laments that she is gone and that he still breathes and lives. On January 11 he wrote: "She is gone! She is lost to me forever! She married! Married to a clod of earth; she will become as insensible herself; all those fine capabilities will moulder." She had, however, not yet married. It was the recollections of these acute sufferings that he later put into the mouth of the maniac in _Julian and Maddalo_; those poignant ravings were for a half century regarded as impersonal, and were never thought to be directed against a real woman whom he loved. In the latter part of March, 1811, the poet was expelled from Oxford for his pamphlet on atheism. In the meantime he had met Harriet Westbrook and married her, in a spirit of gallantry, in the latter part of August, 1811; he sympathised with her because of her sufferings at home. He also liked Elizabeth Hitchener at the time, and later asked her to come and live with his wife and himself. She did so about July, 1812. Shelley's wife had no liking for her, so Miss Hitchener was practically bribed by the poet to leave. This she did in November. Shelley was disillusioned in her, and he really had very little in common with her, though she was intellectually superior to Harriet, Shelley's wife. In July, 1814, Shelley deserted his wife. A few weeks later he left with Mary Godwin, with whom he had been friendly since the spring of the year. On December, 1816, Harriet committed suicide by drowning, while pregnant. Shelley married his second wife legally December 30, 1816. He probably was not madly in love with her. Mention should be made of two cases of unreciprocated affection for him on the part of the poet's two sisters-in-law, Fanny Godwin, who committed suicide, and Jane Clairmont, the daughter of Mrs. Godwin by a previous marriage, and also known as the mistress of Byron.