Maria Gisborne

Maria Gisborne (née James, previously Reveley; 1770 – 1836) was a friend and correspondent of Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Godwin.

Maria James, the daughter of an English merchant at Constantinople, was born in 1770, probably in England. When she was eight years old, her mother, who had been left in poverty, determined to rejoin her husband and sailed for Constantinople, only to discover that James had established a new household with the wife of one of his skippers. He persuaded his wife to return to England by promising an annuity, but had Maria kidnapped and concealed until her mother's departure. He subsequently brought her up with care, and gave her a good education. She showed a talent for painting, and grew up a beautiful and accomplished woman. Mary Shelley later hinted at sexual precocity, writing of Maria's upbringing that "she was left to run wild as she might, and at a very early age had gone through the romance of life".Jeremy Bentham met her at her father's house in Constantinople in 1785, accompanied her on the violin, and said that she was the only woman he had met who could keep time. Not long afterwards, she and her father moved to Rome.

In about 1788, Maria married Willey Reveley, an architect who had been travelling in Greece to make sketches for Sir Richard Worsley. He contributed some views of the Levant to the Museum Worsleyanum (1794), the catalogue of Worsley's collections; and, also in 1794, edited the third volume of James Stuart's Antiquities of Athens. Maria's father was opposed to the marriage and refused to help the couple financially, and they returned to England, where they lived on an income of £140 a year.

There were two children of the marriage, born before Maria was twenty: one was Henry Willey Reveley, who later became an engineer in Cape Town and Western Australia; the name of the other is not known. Willey Reveley was a strong liberal, and became a friend of William Godwin and Thomas Holcroft. About 1791 he received his first professional fee as an architect, £10, for assisting Bentham in preparing drawings for his Panopticon scheme. However, he died suddenly on 6 July 1799 from the rupture of a blood-vessel on the brain.

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