Among English people of Shelley's generation, war in Spain made the guitar (well, the "Spanish guitar," to be distinguished from an archaic instrument called the "English guitar," or "gittern") more visible in London, and the talk of the town.

When Jane Williams met Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley in Pisa in 1821, she delighted them with her musical ability. She played piano (a relatively new and very "modern" instrument!), harp, and guitar. She also had quite a "Romantic" personal history. In 1814, at age seventeen, she had married Captain John Edward Johnson. When he proved an abusive husband, she flouted convention by leaving him. After some time, she met Captain Edward Ellerker Williams, an aspiring writer and artist retired from military service in his mid-twenties.

One of the United Kingdom's five national research libraries, the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, is the permanent home of Jane's guitar. In 1897, an extreme fan of Percy Bysshe Shelley, retired merchant seaman Captain Edward Silsbee of Salem, Massachusetts, purchased the guitar from Jane Williams's grandson and immediately donated it to the Bodleian. This library, founded by the sixteenth-century scholar Sir Thomas Bodley, is one of the oldest and most useful research libraries in England. It is architecturally distinctive.