Maria Gisborne (née James, previously Reveley; 1770–1836) was a friend and correspondent of Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Godwin.
[1][2] 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.
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".
[1] In about 1788, Maria married Willey Reveley, an architect who had been travelling in Greece to make sketches for Sir Richard Worsley.
[1] 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.