“The earth is not, nor ever can be heaven”: The Last Man

Abstract

With the news of Byron’s death at Missolonghi Shelley was finally able to begin writing the novel that she had planned months before. She now felt completely alone and believed (unrealistically, given her wide circle of friends), that she would never engage in exhilarating conversation again, or rather listen to it. Byron’s death meant the end of the voice that in her memory always responded to her husband’s while she sat in silence. PBS was now finally dead, as was the powerful ghost of his intellectual discourse. Shelley was profoundly sad at Byron’s death but with her increased sense of isolation came her first real intellectual breathing space. Her imagination could expand freely and with a new ebullience she could attack a theme grander than any she had attempted before. She was finally independent and no longer needed to define herself in terms of PBS. The Last Man is her final (fictional) word on that deeply disturbing intellectual and emotional conflict.