“My labours have cheered long hours of solitude, and taken me out of a world, which has averted its once benignant face from me, to one glowing with imagination and power.”
Shelley describes imaginative literary work as a way of carrying herself through solitude and personal sorrow by entering a created world with emotional force and possibility.
Source details
The Last Man, Introduction, represented by Project Gutenberg #18247. Shelley's sentence follows her fictional Sibylline-leaves framing and reflects on how the imaginative labour of shaping the narrative helped her through solitude and loss. It belongs to authorial/literary autobiography around the novel's frame, not clinical mental-health guidance or evidence that tragic narration has the same effect for every reader.