The hero in Mary Shelley’s “The Last Man,” her second sweeping political science fiction after “Frankenstein,” is left alone in Rome, in a post-apocalyptic world. A global plague apparently took the lives of everyone else, yet he discerns a duty to forge ahead, no matter what.
Published in 1826, the novel mirrored Shelley’s life as she despaired at the loss of several of her loved ones. Her sister Fanny died by suicide. Her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, drowned after a sailing accident. She lost another friend, the poet Lord Byron, to infection. Two of her toddlers died — one of malaria, and another from a fever. She kept a kind of plague journal, according to Eileen Hunt Botting…
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