Frankenstein Author Mary Shelley on the Surest Remedy for a Sunken Spirit and What Makes Life Worth Living

The Marginalian reflects on Mary Shelley's novel The Last Man, written after the deaths of three of her children and her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. In the novel, which imagines a pandemic erasing humanity, Shelley proposes that the surest remedy for a sunken spirit is to improve ourselves and contribute to the happiness of others. The article highlights how her protagonist finds meaning in nature's resilience, and notes that Shelley outlived all the Romantics, devoting herself to editing and promoting her husband's poetry. Shelley set the story in the late twenty-first century, culminating in the year twenty ninety-two.

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