The Last Man

Mary Shelley (1797-1851), the only daughter of writers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, is the critically acclaimed author of Frankenstein, Valperga, and The Last Man, in addition to many other works. Mary Shelley's writings reflect and were influenced by a number of literary traditions including Gothic and Romantic ideals, and Frankenstein is widely regarded as the first modern work of science fiction. Today's scholarship of Mary Shelley's writings reveal her to be a political radical, as demonstrated though recurring themes of cooperation and sympathy, particularly among women, in her work, which are in direct conflict with the individual Romantic ideals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.