Just as we might say that without readers literature does not actually exist. Lionel Verney discovers himself in the same textual predicament, a provincial in London, an outsider to ordinary civilization, and when alone, forced to consider his own life and nature through prior terms that can no longer define the world he sees before him. He is without gender and without vision, except as reflection. It is most essentially life without Adrian. Yet what Verney has witnessed, his ability to read the depths of everyone's heart and to record this accurately and generously, becomes the reason for his sole survivorship.
Any single woman is too absorbed in the present, and any single man is too consumed by ambition.
Even Evadne, with the passionate strength of a man, and fighting in drag in Raymond's army only to die, is too conflicted by her woman's heart to achieve any real goal. The Sibyl herself embodies the utmost strength of the feminine spirit, and his witness of this strength, not its imitation, provides Shelley with yet another translation. Verney does not disappear into the Sibyl, as Perdita and Evadne both do, but becomes himself the Sibylline leaves, the very poem of the West Wind. He becomes the voice of Adrian. This is a potent witnessing, a sacrifice not of self to art but of self to truth, a translation of the self into something more than mere memory.