Mrs. Shelley made the great mistake of writing this novel in the first person. The Last Man, who is telling the story, although he has the name of Lionel, is most assuredly of the female sex. The friendship between him and Adrian is not the friendship of man for man, but rather the love of man and woman.
Mrs. Shelley's next novel, Lodore, written in 1835, thirteen years after the death of her husband, had a better outlined plot and more definite characters. But again it echoes the past. Lord Byron's unhappy married relations and Shelley's troubles with Harriet are blended in the story, Lord Byron furnishing the character in some respects of Lord Lodore, while his wife, Cornelia Santerre, resembles both Harriet and Lady Byron. Lady Santerre, the mother of Cornelia, augments the trouble between Lord and Lady Lodore, and, contrary to the evident intentions of the writer, the reader's sympathies are largely with Cornelia and Lady Santerre. When Lodore wishes Cornelia to go to America to save him from disgrace, Lady Santerre objects to her daughter's accompanying him:
"He will soon grow tired of playing the tragic hero on a stage surrounded by no spectators; he will discover the folly of his conduct; he will return, and plead for forgiveness, and feel that he is too fortunate in a wife who has preserved her own conduct free from censure and remark while he has made himself a laughing-stock to all."
These words strangely bring to mind Lord Byron as having evoked them.
Again Lady Lodore's letter to her husband at the time of his departure to America reminds one of Lady Byron:
"If heaven have blessings for the coldly egotistical, the unfeeling despot, may those blessings be yours; but do not dare to interfere with emotions too pure, too disinterested for you ever to understand. Give me my child, and fear neither my interference nor resentment."
Lady Lodore's character changes in the book, and becomes more like that of Harriet Shelley. As Mrs. Shelley wrote, fragments of the past evidently came into her mind and influenced her pen, and her original conception of the characters was forgotten. Clorinda, the beautiful, eloquent, and passionate Neapolitan, was drawn from Emilia Viviani, who had suggested to Shelley his poem Epipsychidion, while both Horatio Saville, who had "no thought but for the nobler creations of the soul, and the discernment of the sublime laws of God and nature," and his cousin Villiers, also an enthusiastic worshipper of nature, possessed many of Shelley's qualities.
Besides two other novels of no value, Perkin Warbeck and Falkner, Mrs. Shelley wrote numerous short stories for the annuals, at that time so much in vogue. In 1891, these were collected and edited with an appreciative criticism by Sir Richard Garnett. Many of them have the intensity and sustained interest of Frankenstein.
After the death of her husband, grief and trouble dimmed Mrs. Shelley's imagination. But the pale student Frankenstein, the monster he created, and the beautiful priestess, Beatrice, three strong conceptions, testify to the genius of Mary Shelley.