Falkner by Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley's final novel opens with a six-year-old orphan talking a brooding man down from a cliff edge, and it closes with that same girl, grown up, engineering the moral reconciliation of two men whose history has nearly destroyed them all. That arc — female virtue as the active redemptive force — is the book's most interesting feature, and modern scholarship has rightly recovered its feminist subtext. For readers working through Shelley's full career, Falkner is genuinely valuable. The candid caveat is that it does not belong in the same conversation as Frankenstein or The Last Man: the characterization is thinner, the pace is slow by any standard, and it holds real interest primarily for specialists in Romantic and Victorian women's fiction. Worth the time for Shelley completists; not the place to start.