Powerful and complex, this novel touches on issues of race, gender roles, and women's education in the late eighteenth century. Adeline Mowbray tells a story of desire, transgression, and remorse over the lives of a mother and daughter. As the subtitle suggests, this novel begins and ends with the relationship between Adeline and her intellectual, experimental mother, Editha, but encompasses almost every other human relationship in the long journey between their rift and their reconciliation. Pursued and exploited by the same two men, Editha and Adeline are estranged from each other by jealousy and deceit, but finally reunited. A critique of the treatment of women in eighteenth-century society, the novel was inspired in part by the partnership between the Romantic writers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. The appendices include contemporary reviews and material expanding on the novel's themes of colonialism, women's education, marriage, and the tension between feeling and reason. It is the only stand-alone edition available (see Competition). It is edited and comes with an excellent introduction by a well-known Romanticist.

Mary Shelley's third published novel, The Last Man, is a disillusioned vision of the end of civilization, set in the twenty-first century. The book offers a sweeping account of war, plague, love, and desolation. It is the sort of apocalyptic vision that was widespread at the time, though Shelley's treatment of the theme goes beyond the conventional; it is extraordinarily interesting and deeply moving. If The Last Man is in some sense a "conventional" text of the period, it is also intensely personal in its origin; Shelley refers in her journal to the last man as her alter ego, "the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me." The novel thus develops out of and contributes to a network of story and idea in which fantasy, allusion, convention, and autobiography are densely interwoven. This new version of the first edition (1826) sets out to provide not only a thoroughly annotated text, but also contextual materials to help the reader acquire knowledge of the intellectual and literary milieu out of which the novel emerged. Appendices include material on "the last man" as early nineteenth-century hero, texts from the debate initiated by Malthus in 1798 about the adequacy of food supply to sustain human population, various accounts of outbreaks of plague, and Shelley's poems representing her feelings after the death of her husband.