The Last Man

Mary Shelley wrote The Last Man eight years after Frankenstein, on returning to England from Italy after her husband Percy's death. It is the twenty-first century, and England is a republic governed by a ruling élite, one of whom, Adrian, Earl of Windsor, has introduced a Cumbrian boy to the circle. This outsider, Lionel Verney, narrates a tale of complicated, tragic love, and of the gradual extermination of the human race by plague.
The Last Man also functions as an intriguing roman-d-clef for the saintly Adrian is a monument to Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his friend Lord Raymond is a portrait of Byron. The novel offers a vision of the future that expresses a reaction against Romanticism, as Shelley demonstrates the failure of the imagination and of art to redeem her doomed characters.