The mathematician, writer, and women's rights activist Sof'ia Kovalevskaia was the first woman in the world to receive a doctorate in mathematics and the first woman in nineteenth-century Europe to teach mathematics (or, indeed, any subject) at the university level. Kovalevskaia's work on the rotation of a solid body about a fixed point won a prize from the French Academy of Sciences; she was the first woman to serve on the editorial board of a major scientific journal and the first woman elected as a Corresponding Member of the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences. Indeed, she was arguably the greatest woman scientist before Maria Sklodowska Curie. During the same time that Kovalevskaia achieved international fame because of her scientific accomplishments, she also attained recognition as a writer. She wrote a number of plays, novellas, poems, essays, and sketches, many of which were unfinished at the time of her...