Since this book was printed, a series of letters from Harriet Shelley to an Irish friend, Mrs. Nugent, containing references to the separation from Shelley, has been published in the New York Nation. These letters, however, add nothing to what was previously known of Harriet’s history and life with Shelley. After November 1813 the correspondence ceases. It is resumed in August 1814, after the separation and Shelley’s departure from England. Harriet’s account of these events—gathered by her at second-hand from those who can, themselves, have had no knowledge of the facts they professed to relate—embodies all the slanderous reports adverted to in the seventh chapter of the present work, and all the gratuitous falsehoods circulated by Mrs. Godwin;—falsehoods which Professor Dowden, in the Appendix to his Life of Shelley, has been at the trouble directly to disprove, statement by statement;—falsehoods of which the Author cannot but hope that an amply sufficient, if an indirect, refutation may be found in the present Life of Mary Shelley.