Virginia Neville’s return is the decisive reversal in Robert Neville’s mourning. Her heart stops, he buries her rather than surrendering her body to the plague fires, and she later comes back to the house as a vampire. What appears at first to be a miraculous recovery becomes the final destruction of his marital bond: Virginia’s body returns, but the woman he loved does not.

Death and Refusal of the Fires

Virginia Neville’s death occurs in the quiet morning on Cimarron Street. Her heart has stopped, and Robert Neville sits beside her white face, holding her fingers and stroking them while his own body becomes almost immobile. His mind seems to harden under the shock; he cannot understand why despair does not physically crush him, because with Virginia, life and the world have halted.

The loss also awakates the earlier death of Kathy Neville. In his mind, Robert Neville sees again the great fire, Kathy’s tiny body in his arms, and a man snatching the child away and carrying her into the dark mist. The memory drives him toward a berserk response, but it also clarifies what he will not permit a second time. He refuses to place Virginia in the same system of compulsory destruction that has already taken Kathy from him.

Burial Against Public Law

Robert Neville knows that the law requires every dead body to be transported immediately to the fires because only flames can destroy the bacteria that caused the plague. Funeral parlors are closed, and morticians are prevented from practicing. Yet the legal rule turns death into another form of social violence: husbands must surrender wives, parents must surrender children, and children must surrender parents to an enormous communal bonfire.

He therefore decides that Virginia will not be burned. After an hour of indecision, he takes needle and thread and sews the blanket over her body until only her face remains visible, then closes the covering over her mouth, nose, and eyes. The act is laborious and intimate, a private substitute for the public ritual imposed by the plague. He drinks whisky, carries her from the house, and buries her himself. The burial ends eleven years of marriage, but it also preserves his vow that her body will not be consumed by the fires.

Afterward, grief becomes bodily exhaustion and temporal suspension. Two days after the burial, Robert Neville lies fully clothed on his bed, half drunk, staring into the black ceiling while the spilled whisky spreads across the floor. The clock’s electric chronology continues, but his repeated awareness of the hour cannot restore movement to the life that ended with Virginia.

The Apparent Return

The return begins at night through sound and interruption. Robert Neville’s hand recoils when the doorknob turns, and someone mutters indistinctly on the porch. He opens the door, allowing moonlight into the house, and cannot even scream when he sees Virginia standing before him. She is first presented as an impossible recognition, a figure whose presence collapses the boundary between burial and life. Her only word is an attempt to say his name: “Rob ... ert.”

The scene makes return itself terrifying because it offers no stable restoration. Virginia has come back, but her appearance does not undo the burial or revive the marriage. Her presence instead reveals that death in the plague-stricken world is reversible only in a corrupted biological sense: the dead may move again while the human identity attached to them has been replaced.

Recognition and Forced Violence

Robert Neville later explains that he had mistaken Virginia’s return for the return of his wife. She appeared to him as an outline or shadow, dead yet present, and he tried to keep her with him. But she was no longer the same. Her desire was not companionship or domestic life; she wanted blood. The horror is intensified by the collision between marital intimacy and predation. The returned body belongs to the person he loved, while its appetite makes that love impossible.

He finally stakes her, repeating the method he has used against the other vampires. He describes the act as something he had to do, not as a triumph or an expression of hatred. The stake becomes the only action his knowledge of the new condition permits, and the practical rule of vampire survival becomes unbearable when applied to his own wife. Virginia’s second destruction therefore completes the loss that her burial began: Robert Neville must kill her once as a dead body’s threat, after already losing her as a living woman.

Consequences for Robert Neville

Virginia’s return remains active in Robert Neville’s mind long after the event. He dreams about her and cries out in sleep, gripping the sheets with frantic fingers. When he later recounts the episode to Ruth, the memory breaks through his guarded isolation: he speaks of his own wife returning to drink his blood, then admits that he had to put a stake in her. The confession is not merely explanatory; it exposes the emotional wound beneath his scientific routines and nightly defenses.

His response to later attachments is shaped by this earlier catastrophe. The appearance of the surviving dog gives him a possible companion, and he handles the sick animal gently, promising that it will soon be better; the dog dies within a week, repeating the pattern in which hope becomes another loss. When Robert Neville and Ruth finally hold each other tightly, that physical closeness carries the pressure of the earlier bereavement: it is a moment of renewed human contact after a relationship with Virginia has been transformed into an encounter with a threat.

Virginia’s return also deepens the novel’s reversal of the vampire myth. Robert Neville has learned to interpret vampirism through disease, infection, and bodily mechanisms rather than supernatural legend, but the return of his wife shows that scientific explanation does not reduce the experience’s emotional terror. The event makes his house, once a place of marital life and later a defensive shelter, into the site where love, death, memory, and predation become inseparable.