The interest centres in the two heroines, Euthanasia, Countess of Valperga, and Beatrice, Prophetess of Ferrara. Strong, intellectual, and passionate, not until the time of George Eliot did women of this type become prominent in fiction. Euthanasia, a Guelph and a Florentine, with a soul "adapted for the reception of all good," was betrothed to the youth Castruccio, whom she at that time loved. Later, when his character deteriorated under the influence of selfish ambition, she ceased to love him, and said, "He cast off humanity, honesty, honourable feeling, all that I prize." Castruccio belonged to the Ghibelines, so that the story of their love is intertwined with the struggle between these two parties in Italy.
But more beautiful than the intellectual character of Euthanasia, is the spiritual one of Beatrice, the adopted daughter of the bishop of Ferrara, who is regarded with feelings of reverence by her countrymen, because of her prophetic powers. Pure and deeply religious, she accepted all the suggestions of her mind as a message from God. When Castruccio came to Ferrara and was entertained by the bishop as the prince and liberator of his country, she believed that together they could accomplish much for her beloved country: "She prayed to the Virgin to inspire her; and, again giving herself up to reverie, she wove a subtle web, whose materials she believed heavenly, but which were indeed stolen from the glowing wings of love." No wonder she believed the dictates of her own heart, she whose words the superstition of the age had so often declared miraculous. She was barely seventeen and she loved for the first time. How pathetic is her disillusionment when Castruccio bade her farewell for a season, as he was about to leave Ferrara. She had believed that the Holy Spirit had brought Castruccio to her that by the union of his manly qualities and her divine attributes some great work might be fulfilled. But as he left her, he spoke only of earthly happiness:
"It was her heart, her whole soul she had given; her understanding, her prophetic powers, all the little universe that with her ardent spirit she grasped and possessed, she had surrendered, fully, and without reserve; but, alas! the most worthless part alone had been accepted, and the rest cast as dust upon the winds."
Afterwards, when she wandered forth a beggar, and was rescued by Euthanasia, she exclaimed to her:
"You either worship a useless shadow, or a fiend in the clothing of a God."
The daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft could fully sympathise with Beatrice. In the grief, almost madness, with which Beatrice realises her self-deception, there are traces of Frankenstein. Perhaps no problem plucked from the tree of good and evil was so ever-present to Mary Shelley as why misery so often follows an obedience to the highest dictates of the soul. Both her father and mother had experienced this; and she and Shelley had tasted of the same bitter fruit. In the analysis of Beatrice's emotions Mrs. Shelley shows herself akin to Charlotte Brontë.
Three years after the death of Shelley, she published The Last Man. It relates to England in the year 2073 when, the king having abdicated his throne, England had become a republic. Soon after this, however a pestilence fell upon the people, which drove them upon the continent, where they travelled southward, until only one man remained. The plot is clumsy; the characters are abstractions.
But the feelings of the author, written in clear letters on every page, are a valuable addition to the history of the poet Shelley and his wife. Besides her fresh sorrow for her husband, Byron had died only the year before. Her mind was brooding on the days the three had spent together. Her grief was too recent to be shaken from her mind or lost sight of in her imaginative work. Shelley, and the scenes she had looked on with him, the conversations between him and his friends, creep in on every page. Lionel Verney, the Last Man, is the supposed narrator of the story. He thus describes Adrian, the son of the king: "A tall, slim, fair boy, with a physiognomy expressive of the excess of sensibility and refinement, stood before me; the morning sunbeams tinged with gold his silken hair, and spread light and glory over his beaming countenance ... he seemed like an inspired musician, who struck, with unerring skill, the 'lyre of mind,' and produced thence divinest harmony.... His slight frame was over informed by the soul that dwelt within.... He was gay as a lark carrolling from its skiey tower.... The young and inexperienced did not understand the lofty severity of his moral views, and disliked him as a being different from themselves." Shelley, of course, was the original of this picture. Lord Byron suggested the character of Lord Raymond: "The earth was spread out as a highway for him; the heavens built up as a canopy for him." "Every trait spoke predominate self-will; his smile was pleasing, though disdain too often curled his lips—lips which to female eyes were the very throne of beauty and love.... Thus full of contradictions, unbending yet haughty, gentle yet fierce, tender and again neglectful, he by some strange art found easy entrance to the admiration and affection of women; now caressing and now tyrannising over them according to his mood, but in every change a despot."
A large part of the three volumes is taken up with a characterisation of Adrian and Lord Raymond, the latter of whom falls when fighting for the Greeks. How impossible it was for her to rid her mind of her own sorrow is shown at the end of the third volume, where Adrian is drowned, and Lionel Verney is left alone. He thus says of his friend:
"All I had possessed of this world's goods, of happiness, knowledge, or virtue—I owed to him. He had, in his person, his intellect, and rare qualities, given a glory to my life, which without him it had never known. Beyond all other beings he had taught me that goodness, pure and simple, can be an attribute of man."