What comes after the end? Or, as Eileen Hunt asks at the outset of her bracing new book, “[W]hat is to be done after a massive, human-made disaster?” (p. 2). This, according to Hunt, is the central question of “modern post-apocalyptic political thought,” a constellation that she examines with reference to Mary Shelley’s third novel The Last Man (1826). While Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is widely invoked as the foundational novel of modern science fiction, The Last Man, though comparatively unsung, has likewise been hailed as the first major postapocalyptic novel. It concerns a devastating global plague that, by the time the story concludes in the year 2100, seems to have left only Shelley’s protagonist, Lionel Verney, alive out of all humanity.

Though Shelley’s third novel has never attained the canonical status of Frankenstein, it enjoyed modest rediscovery amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with several scholars—including Hunt herself, in the New York Times—engaging Shelley’s vision of collapse for political and existential insights. That the pandemic has since ceded prominence to subsequent crises does not, however, lessen the relevance of Shelley’s novel or Hunt’s study: as the post- in postapocalyptic reminds us, both writers are concerned with what follows the collapse. And so Hunt reads Shelley as a chronicler of personal and political catastrophe, but also, by the end of her erudite and affecting study, as a prophet of hope.

Hunt is as qualified a guide to Shelley’s life and writing as one could ask for, having previously written two books on Shelley’s mother, the philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, and two on Shelley’s Frankenstein. She is by now intimately familiar with Shelley’s biography and milieu, and her study of The Last Man is richly contextualized both in terms of intellectual history and human drama. A central point of her study is that The Last Man, with its themes of desolation and perseverance, reflects Shelley’s reckoning with the then-recent death of her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, among other devastating personal losses. This suggestion, like all of Hunt’s interpretive moves, is grounded in a meticulous reconstruction of Shelley’s thought—Hunt reads The Last Man against a textured backdrop of Shelley’s contemporaneous writing, both public and private, always keenly sensitive to the intellectual and emotional life of her subject.

Those who only know Shelley as the author of Frankenstein might initially think her an odd muse for political philosophizing, but Shelley’s best-known work is not entirely representative of her oeuvre and is perhaps her least political novel. Shelley was, as Hunt reminds us, the daughter of two celebrated political philosophers, and several of her novels—such as Valperga (1823) and The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830)—concern nobles and heads of state whose idealism is tested in the crucible of power politics. The Last Man splits the difference: on the one hand, its future-flung setting is unique among Shelley’s novels, and it deploys, like Frankenstein, a science-fictional conceit. But like her historical novels, it engages explicitly with questions of political philosophy: the character of Adrian embodies the republican principles of her late husband (he eventually drowns when a storm capsizes his ship, just as Percy Shelley had), and confronts, with Verney as his trusted advisor, a world riven not only by plague but also by ambition, war, and demagoguery.

Hunt has good reason, then, to treat The Last Man as an exercise in what she calls “poliscifi” or “political science fiction.” In a prologue adapted from her New York Times essay, Hunt credits Shelley with foreseeing “the disaster of a pandemic would be driven by politics … caused by what people and their leaders had done and failed to do on the international stage” (p. vii). It’s an irresistible hook, but what follows is much more than a paean to Shelley’s prescience. In fact, Hunt largely leaves it to her readers to discern parallels with the present, instead foregrounding Shelley’s world with careful research and shrewd analysis. Not only that, she invites us into the archives with her, peppering her pages with images from Shelley’s journal and notebooks that make her intellectual biography tangible and even thrilling—the genesis of The Last Man becomes an intoxicating Gothic mystery of its own.

The introduction, “Contagions of Misfortune,” cannily situates The Last Man within a canon of “plague literature,” which includes antecedents such as Thucydides’ account of the Plague of Athens, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, and more proximately, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). Hunt excavates Shelley’s study of (and frequent allusion to) these predecessors, all the better to appreciate the novelty of The Last Man. While plague literature has frequently allegorized human conflict and corruption, Hunt maintains that “Shelley’s profound literary innovation was to make this point explicit, by foregrounding the conflicts that drive plagues – not the plagues that drive conflicts” (p. 27) while her “distinctive philosophical contribution to plague literature was to conceive of all plagues — real and metaphorical — as human contaminations of their wider social environment” (p. 29).

This chapter also introduces the imaginative conceit of Hunt’s study, which is to take the apocalyptic themes of The Last Man as an expression of Shelley’s broader philosophy of human misfortune. Hunt’s portrait is of a tragic political thinker concerned with the existential categories of mortality and suffering, one who asked how we go on in the face of catastrophe because her own life was so riven by devastation. Before arriving at The Last Man in the book’s third chapter, Hunt dedicates the first to Shelley’s “Journal of Sorrow” (1822–26)—the private diaries she wrote in the aftermath of her husband’s death—and the second to her translation of Oedipus Rex, one of several ancient tragedies she immersed herself in as she reckoned with her own misfortunes.

When Hunt finally returns us to the plague-ravaged world of Shelley’s novel, we are well-equipped to grasp its stakes—personal, political, and philosophical. Hunt’s sensitivity to Shelley is affecting throughout: a feat of scholarship and of empathy which, Hunt discloses in a moving epilogue, has been heightened by the parallels between her own life and Shelley’s. There, Hunt explains how the loss of her brother and later a boyfriend inflected her career as a scholar, and how, amid the isolation of COVID-19 quarantine, she sought in Shelley “a way of writing that transforms sorrow into hope” (p. 157).

Hunt’s study is at its best when foregrounding Shelley’s writing, though some of her broader interpretive moves are strained. Shelley’s thought has often been construed in narrow relation to her parents’ or her husband’s work, and Hunt’s efforts to locate Shelley within more encompassing traditions—from plague writing and postapocalyptic literature to existentialism and even, in the third chapter, international relations theory—are therefore refreshing, but sometimes more capricious than convincing. I’m not entirely persuaded, for instance, that we ought to “push the intellectual history of existentialism further back in time to Mary Shelley” (p. 124), nor that such a maneuver would be the best way to capture what is distinctive in Shelley’s philosophizing.

To be sure, Hunt is fastidious about establishing direct lines of influence where she can and forthright about where she cannot. But what I find myself wanting amidst these maneuvers is not so much a hard trail of citations—definitive proof that The Last Man was read by or at least known to H.G. Wells, George Orwell, Albert Camus, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, and so on—but rather a more precise and substantive conversation between their perspectives. Even so, I take it as a virtue of Hunt’s work that it will likely stimulate future scholars to further develop some of these dialogues. (For those interested in teaching or studying The Last Man themselves, Hunt’s forthcoming Oxford edition is worth looking out for, as it will combine Shelley’s novel and her “Journal of Sorrow.”)

Across her three books on Mary Shelley, Hunt has extended an invitation for political scientists to revisit an author who is both culturally ubiquitous and, outside of Frankenstein, understudied and underread. While her last two books made a convincing case for Frankenstein’s relevance to political thought, The First Last Man expands the effort substantially, reminding us that Shelley has more than one prophetic novel to stimulate our imaginations and drawing attention to the philosophical bounty of her life writing. That Hunt’s study arrives in a world still reeling from a pandemic, of course, adds to its intrigue, but I would confidently recommend her book even without the topical angle, as its greatest riches lie less in its commentary on our world than in Hunt’s magisterial rendering of Shelley’s.