The story of Shelley’s life is inextricably linked with the stories of the women who influenced his work, and of the children for whom he was responsible. This chapter explores the ways in which this superficially least domestic of men produced a body of work shaped in fundamental ways by his relationships with the women and children in his family, as well as by those with a small number of other women who existed beyond its boundaries. It traces Shelley’s relationships with Harriet Westbrook, Elizabeth Hitchener, Mary Godwin, Claire Clairmont, Teresa Viviani, and Jane Williams in and out of his biography and his poetry, arguing that although neither these women nor the children in their care could always live up to Shelley’s vision of ideal, uncircumscribed companionship, they were no less important to either his life or his art because of their complicated, flesh-and-blood reality.