Harriet Martineau's "somewhat remarkable" life, her controversial books and essays, and her strongly held convictions on such diverse matters as slavery, woman's rights, farming, medicine, and religion were frequent subjects of comment among the major figures of the Victorian literary world. Almost everyone of note in literary circles on both sides of the Atlantic had something to say about "Miss Martineau," yet few twentieth-century readers are familiar with her writings.

Like many Victorian writers and intellectuals, she left an account of a grim childhood. The sixth of eight children of bombazine manufacturers, Thomas and Elizabeth Rankin Martineau, Harriet Martineau was reared according to what she described in her Autobiography (1877) as the "taking-down system." She was offered little sympathy either for her intense childhood fears or for the multitude of physical symptoms which plagued her in her early years. When she began to become deaf at the age of...