Isabel Baxter became Mary's close friend almost by accident. Mary's early adolescence
had been troubled, particularly fractious where her stepmother was involved; and Godwin
decided that some distance would have a salutary effect on her rebelliousness. He
contacted a radical acquaintance from the 1790s, Richard Baxter, a Scotsman who was
a good friend of his own friend David Booth, who agreed to accept Mary into his family
in Dundee. There at the age of fourteen she took up a happy residence that, as this
account indicates, combined a closeness to nature with a warm affection for the Baxters'
middle daughter Isabel. With this family she resided from June to November 1812, and
from June 1813 to March 1814. Her elopement with the married Percy Bysshe Shelley
not long after her return from this second residence ruptured her friendship, since
David Booth, who had married Isabel in the meantime, refused to allow his wife to
continue her intimacy with a woman who had so abandoned customary propriety.