The Last Man

In the late twenty-first century England has become a republic, and its narrator, Lionel Verney, tells the story of his friends, a romantic poet-lord and a gentle idealist, as they struggle with war and politics. Then a plague appears in the East and spreads across the world, and Verney watches the human race shrink, nation by nation, until he may be the only one left.

Published in 1826, eight years after Frankenstein, the novel was poorly received and largely forgotten until the twentieth century. It is now read as one of the first great pandemic novels and as Mary Shelley's grieving portrait of Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, both of whom had recently died.

Mary Shelley (1797–1851) was the daughter of two radical writers, Mary Wollstonecraft, who died days after her birth, and the philosopher William Godwin. At sixteen she ran away with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and at eighteen, during a rainy summer by Lake Geneva with Lord Byron, she began the story that became Frankenstein.

Her life was marked by loss: three of her four children died young and Percy drowned in 1822. She supported herself by writing, edited her husband's poems and wrote The Last Man, an early novel of a worldwide plague. Her mother's Vindication of the Rights of Woman is also in the library.