‘Why did I continue to live—why not throw off the weary weight of time, and with my own hand, let out the fluttering prisoner from my agonized breast?’
The world is undone by plague, and all that remain of humanity are memories, grief, and echoes of vanished voices.
Mary Shelley’s The Last Man follows Lionel Verney, an outcast that witnesses the turmoil of civilisation and its eventual collapse. Against the backdrop of collapsing empires and fading hopes in the face of the inevitable, The Last Man is a meditation on solitude, mortality, and the fragility of human ambition when confronted with nature’s indifference.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was an English novelist best known for writing the influential novel Frankenstein.