The Last Man, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
The Last Man, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
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The Last Man

Author: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Narrator: Michelle Myers Berg

Unabridged: 19 hr 48 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Spoken Realms

Published: 08/25/2020


Synopsis

The Last Man is an apocalyptic, dystopian science fiction about a future Earth at the time of the late twenty-first century, ravaged by an unknown pandemic which quickly sweeps across the world.It also includes a discussion of English culture as a republic, with Mary Shelley sitting in meetings of the House of Commons to gain an insight into the governmental political system of the romantic era. Within the novel, she dedicates it highly to her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley who drowned in a shipwreck four years before the book’s publication. It is also dedicated to her dear friend Lord Byron who adored the Greek isles which were eventually his place of death.The Last Man was severely suppressed at the time. It was not until the 1960s that the novel resurfaced for the public as a work of fiction, not prophesy. The Last Man is the first piece of dystopian fiction published, yet it is debated among literary critics whether The Last Man can be classed as a dystopian novel as it excludes political themes of repression and totalitarianism of the novels of later periods such as Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World.

About Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

The daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, the ardent feminist and author of A Vindication on the Right of Women, and William Goodwin, the radical-anarchist philosopher and author of Lives of the Necromancers, Mary Goodwin was born into a free-thinking, revolutionary household in London on August 30, 1797. Educated mainly by her intellectual surroundings, she had little formal schooling, and at age sixteen, she eloped with the young poet Percy Bysshe Shelly; they eventually married in 1816. Mary Shelly's life had many tragic elements: her mother died giving birth to Mary; her half-sister committed suicide; Percy's wife Harriet Shelly drowned herself and her unborn child after he ran off with Mary; William Goodwin disowned Mary and Shelly after the elopement but, heavily in debt, recanted and came to them for money; Mary's first child died soon after its birth; and in 1822 Percy Shelly drowned in the Gulf of La Spezia—Mary was not quite twenty-five then. Mary did not begin to write seriously until the summer of 1816, when she and Shelly were living in Switzerland, neighbors to Lord Byron. One night following a contest to compose ghost stories, Mary conceived her masterpiece, Frankenstein. After her husband's death, she continued to write, publishing Valperga, The Last Man, Ladore, and Faulkner between 1823 and 1837, in addition to editing Percy's works. In 1838 she began to work on his biography, but due to poor health she completed only a fragment.

About Michelle Myers Berg

Michelle Myers Berg trained at the University of Minnesota and the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. She has performed everything from the classics to live interactive theatre and has enjoyed over thirty years of doing voice over for radio and TV.


Reviews

Revisiting this during a global pandemic seems rather unnerving because this is a book in which the entirety of humanity dies after succumbing to plague. And the more I read it the more I take from it. This is my third time round. The first was for enjoyment and the second two were for research purp......more

I don't really like reading, which must strain credulity, since I devote so much of my time and energy to doing it. But reading, for me, is never an easy thing. Only rarely do I get caught up and find myself turning pages heedlessly, plunging into the text. More often, I am well aware of what page I......more

Goodreads review by Henry

You are the last person on the face of the Earth every desire can be easily obtained, the best of the best shelter, food , clothes, toys, transportation an endless vacation go anywhere do anything , nobody can stop it the enormous world is all yours...Only one little problem the animals have inherit......more


Quotes

“[The Last Man] in its refusal to place humanity at the center of the universe, its questioning of our privileged position in relation to nature…constitutes a profound and prophetic challenge to Western humanism.” Kari Lokke, literary scholar