In the obituary she wrote for herself, Harriet Martineau claimed that her powers as a writer derived merely from "earnestness and intellectual clearness within a certain range," that she had "small imaginative and suggestive powers," and that she could only "popularise, while she could neither discover nor invent." These words both summarize her reputation among her readers and reveal the tactics of self-representation that allowed her to maintain the unusual and controversial place she held as a public figure for almost half a century. Among a generation of prominent intellectual reformers, Martineau was one of the few women. She wrote not only on causes that women improvers had championed before—education, the antislavery movement, and the position of women—but also on an astonishingly wide range of political topics, from political economy to foreign policy. Given Victorian definitions of femininity as inherently domestic, private, and protected from a...