The Last Man

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's The Last Man. In her apocalyptic novel The Last Man Mary Shelley imagines the demise of civilization as we know it. The story presents a sombre and dismal image of humanity facing unavoidable destruction in the late twenty-first century. Mary Shelley weaves idealised pictures of Shelley and Byron into her futuristic subject while rejecting Romanticism and its faith in art and nature. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) was the lone child of William Godwin a radical philosopher and Mary Wollstonecraft author of Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She was raised by her father's intellectual network and her own reading after her mother passed away 10 days after her birth. They eloped in July 1814 after she first met Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1812. She started writing Frankenstein her first and most well-known book in the summer of 1816. Her husband drowned in 1822 and three of her children died in infancy. The first editor of P.B. Shelley's poetry and verse Mary went to England with her surviving son and authored novels short stories and travelogues.