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Author Lyndall Gordon argues that Mary Wollstonecraft was not a born genius--she became one. Gordon discusses how this independent, compassionate woman who devised a blueprint for human change achieved that distinction. Wollstonecraft's wide, evolving circles of friends, benefactors, mentors, admirers and detractors are richly sketched out by Gordon, and drama (a money-squandering, abusive father; a sister trapped in a tyrannical marriage; financial crises; unfaithful lovers; attempted suicides) abounds. Wollstonecraft's life was an adventurous one; in Paris, she watched as the admired French Revolution became the Reign of Terror. Yet Wollstonecraft's adventurous life illuminates rather than obscures the philosophical and historical work that made her the foremother of much modern thinking about education and human rights, as well as about women's rights, female sexuality, and the institution of marriage.