Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) is most famous for Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus. A friend suggested her 1826 novel The Last Man was especially poignant during the COVID-19 pandemic.
If you can ignore the Victorian-era obsession with facial characteristics and the casual assumptions of European, in particular British, superiority to the rest of the world, the novel does have some excellent, thought-provoking passages.
Quotations are lifted from the Romantic Circles website page on the novel. The narrator is Lionel Varney, the sole survivor of a plague and its resulting chaos. I've added my thoughts in bold.
