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Mary Shelley created 'Frankenstein,' and then a Pandemic.

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Mary Shelley created 'Frankenstein,' and then a Pandemic.

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Her novel 'The Last Man' predicted the political causes of and collective solutions for global plague.

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Shelley completed "The Last Man" when she was a 28-year-old widow. She was grieving the loss of her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and three of their children. Her first baby girl was born prematurely and survived less than two weeks, the next daughter died of a fever, and her firstborn son died of malaria. Then her young husband drowned in a sailing accident at the peak of his career. Writing "The Last Man" was her attempt to reconcile herself to the tragedies of life without losing hope in humanity itself.

Shelley located the human roots of her fictional plague in a centuries-long war between Greece and Turkey. Scientists think that the spread of the new coronavirus grew from a toxic mix of economic, political and environmental factors surrounding the largely unregulated market for wild animal meat in China and beyond. It has since percolated into an irresponsible game of blame among nations, whose leaders spread rumors that the coronavirus is a foreign bioweapon or even deny the seriousness of the public health crisis within their own borders. As with the coronavirus outbreak, travelers in "The Last Man" disperse the deadly disease across continents, infecting their own families and communities.

Much like Shelley's first novel, "Frankenstein," "The Last Man" proves to be a work of political science fiction. "Frankenstein" shows how a scientist's abandonment of his artificially made creature brings ripple effects of suffering to them and the community. The teenage Shelley may have identified with Victor Frankenstein's so-called monster, for her birth had killed her own mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, via a surgically transmitted infection.

Similarly, "The Last Man" originates in the author's experience of devastating personal loss. After Shelley suffered a mental crisis about whether she could live after the loss of almost everyone she loved, she wrote a cosmopolitan answer to this existential question. The unexpectedly hopeful ending of "The Last Man" suggests that all disasters - however threatening to particular individuals or countries - are ultimately about humanity's responsibility to the world as a whole.

Wise beyond her years, Shelley reminds us through the heroic voice of Verney that we should always act upon hope for retaining what makes us loving, humane and connected to others, even in the face of total catastrophe.

Reading the story lines about the escalating coronavirus outbreaks around the world, we feel worry - even fear - especially for ourselves and our loved ones. But like Shelley and her avatar Verney, we should summon the strength to look beyond that fear with an attitude of hope and collective problem-solving. Only then might we humanely work together to fight the spread of Covid-19, instead of contributing to yet another international epidemiological disaster.

Eileen Hunt Botting (@BottingHunt) is a political theorist whose latest book, "Artificial Life After Frankenstein," is forthcoming from Penn Press in late 2020.
Now in print: The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some . And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com. "Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments" and "The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments," with essays from the series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.

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Opinion | Mary Shelley Created 'Frankenstein,' and Then a Pandemic

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Shelley completed "The Last Man" when she was a 28-year-old widow. She was grieving the loss of her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and three of their children. Her first baby girl was born prematurely and survived less than two weeks, the next daughter died of a fever, and her firstborn son died of malaria.

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Mary Shelley Night, The Last Man (Benjamin Woolley documentary, BBC, 2001)

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Yes. In his 1898 novella entitled Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan, Robertson told the story of a 'superliner' named the Titan, which sank after striking an iceberg on a calm April night, with great loss of life. The Titan was 'the largest craft afloat and the greatest of the works of men'.

Also like the Titanic, she had new watertight compartments which could be closed from the bridge in an instant, and was considered 'practically unsinkable', as she could float with nine of her watertight compartments flooded, and no accident could be imagined which would flood more. Nor did the Titan carry enough lifeboats for everyone on board.

The novella's plot does differ in some respects from the real-life disaster-the Titan capsized and sank very quickly on her third trip from New York, and the ship's specifications aren't exactly the same, but the similarities are nevertheless striking. Indeed, Titanic's sinking on her maiden voyage is a good example of the truth being stranger than fiction, and this may explain some of our enduring fascination with the disaster.

"Robertson's novella also parallels incidents involving the Olympic; the Titan sinks a smaller ship in a collision, just as the Olympic rammed and sank the Nantucket lightship in fog in the 1930s.

In 1914, Robertson again demonstrated his extraordinary powers of prediction in his short story Beyond the Spectrum, about a war between the Americans and the Japanese which began with a sneak attack by the Japanese on Hawaii and involved the use of a searchlight developed by the Americans which had similar effects to the atomic bomb, including blindness, heat and facial burns.

Excerpt From: Tim Maltin. "101 Things You Thought You Knew About the Titanic . . . but Didn't!." iBooks.

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THE TITANIC DISASTER WAS PREDICTED 14 YEARS BEFORE IT HAPPENED BY WRITER MORGAN ROBERTSON.

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Yes. In his 1898 novella entitled Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan, Robertson told the story of a 'superliner' named the Titan, which sank after striking an iceberg on a calm April night, with great loss of life. The Titan was 'the largest craft afloat and the greatest of the works of men'.