"Mary Wollstonecraft was the first major feminist in England, author of the pioneering Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. This biography argues that her life and letters are her most lasting legacy.".

"This biography stresses too her tortured relations with her family, arguing that her resentment of her brother, Ned, and his advantages as an adored boy fuelled her intellectual life. It especially relates her involvement with her two sisters, whom she mothered, dominated, and wounded.

Because they shared her volatile, depressive, and self-dramatizing temperament and were caught on the edge of Mary's tumultuous life, their letters declare what she herself might have been without her special energy and zest.".

"This biography, which makes full use of all her writings, also compares her with other women who came into her orbit: the clever, tragic Fanny Blood, so intensely loved and so betrayed, the pretty young Amelia Alderson, who admired and recoiled from the unconventional, and Mary Hays, caught in the same intellectual and sexual dilemmas but without Wollstonecraft's glamour."--BOOK JACKET.