Not Mary Shelley’s The Last Man

Mackie, Liz and Shelley, Mary

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This book is a respectful revision of an original in the public domain, the end result of a 2-year online project in which novelist Liz Mackie presented her editorial work on Mary Shelley’s little-known “pandemic novel” in regular on-line installments. It has been much edited again for print since she completed the project at thelastman.blog in September 2023, and between this text and the 1826 original there are differences in virtually every line.

A futuristic account of a global pandemic that wipes out the entire human race, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s second novel was published in 1826 to poor reviews and long oblivion. Now, word-by-word renovation reveals a text that stands comfortably alongside Frankenstein as a masterwork of speculative horror. A showcase for Mary Shelley’s epic imagination and rich talents as a travel writer, social critic, and psychologist, The Last Man also succeeds in bringing readers into the room with literary history, as poets Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, heroes of the Romantic era, both appear in detailed fictionalized portraits. And in a revelatory departure from its best-selling predecessor, the book abounds in closely observed female characters, women and girls of strong opinions and strong passions, articulate, dynamic, confronting tragedy with memorable valor. Likewise their creator—who, through them, explored her young widowhood and memorialized her grief.

In this Nostalgistudio edition, The Last Man emerges as the heartbreaking, gripping, well-tuned Mary Shelley novel that 200 years of readers have been hoping for.