"Anne McWhir?s edition of The Last Man is first rate...Shelley herself would have been pleased!"

Mary Shelley?s third published novel, The Last Man, is a disillusioned vision of the end of civilization, set in the twenty-first century. The book offers a sweeping account of war, plague, love and desolation. It is the sort of apocalyptic vision that was widespread at the time, though Shelley?s treatment of the theme goes beyond the conventional; it is extraordinarily interesting and deeply moving.

If The Last Man is in some sense a ?conventional? text of the period, it is also intensely personal in its origin; Shelley refers in her journal to the last man as her alter ego, "the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me." The Novel thus develops out of and contributes to a network of story and idea in which fantasy, allusion, convention and autobiography are densely interwoven.

This new version of the first edition (1826) sets out to provide not only a thoroughly annotated text, but also contextual materials to help the reader acquire knowledge of the intellectual and literary milieu out of which the novel emerged. Appendices include material on ?the last man? as early nineteenth-century hero, texts from the debate initiated by Malthus in 1798 about the adequacy of food supply to sustain human population, various accounts of outbreaks of plague, and Shelley?s poems representing her feelings after the death of her husband.

The Last Man reverberates particularly strongly for the late twentieth-century reader, not only because of its millennial overtones but also because of its parallels between the plague that Shelley depicts and the AIDS epidemic of our own time. Overall, it is a novel that rival's Frankenstein in the rich profusion of ideas it gives rise to in the reader.

This book comes with an introduction and notes by Dr Pamela Bickley, of the Godolphin and Latymer School, formerly of Royal Holloway, University of London. "The Last Man" is Mary Shelley's apocalyptic fantasy of the end of human civilisation. Set in the late twenty-first century, the novel unfolds a sombre and pessimistic vision of mankind confronting inevitable destruction. Interwoven with her futuristic theme, Mary Shelley incorporates idealised portraits of Shelley and Byron, yet rejects Romanticism and its faith in art and nature. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) was the only daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of "Vindication of the Rights of Woman", and the radical philosopher William Godwin. Her mother died ten days after her birth and the young child was educated through contact with her father's intellectual circle and her own reading. She met Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1812; they eloped in July 1814.In the summer of 1816 she began her first and most famous novel, "Frankenstein". Three of her children died in early infancy and in 1822 her husband was drowned.

Mary returned to England with her surviving son and wrote novels, short stories and accounts of her travels; she was the first editor of P.B.Shelley's poetry and verse.

The Broadview Editions series is an effort to represent the ever-changing canon of literature in English by bringing together texts long regarded as classics with valuable, lesser-known literature. Newly type-set and produced on high-quality paper in trade paperback format, the Broadview Editions series is a delight to handle as well as to read.

Each volume includes a full introduction, chronology, bibliography, and explanatory notes along with a variety of documents from the period, giving readers a rich sense of the world from which the work emerged.

Morton D. Paley is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is co-editor of Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly.

2007-06-12 Dated?

Shelley's intense and acutely observed tale of love, war, and the ignominious fate of mankind is very much a novel of its time, with themes common in 19th century literature. The prose is elaborate, the descriptions vivid bordering on flamboyant, but her visionary predictions, portraying the plague that eventually topples civilization in a manner recalling the AIDS epidemic, are startling and remarkable, and conceivably an influence on the likes of Ballard, Matheson and Shiel. This supposedly dated novel of the apocalypse is a surprising, hugely enjoyable, and oft-overlooked gem from the birth of science fiction.