Victoria C. Woodhull was one of the most flamboyant and controversial figures in nineteenth-century letters. Thomas Nast caricatured her in Harper's Weekly as "Mrs. Satan"; a story in the New York Herald described her and her sister Tennessee Claflin as "queens of finance" and "bewitching brokers"; an English reporter said she was "the United States mother of woman's suffrage"; and the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, whom she accused of an illicit love affair, labeled her a "prostitute."

Her unconventional and jolting reformist antics made her the subject of many book-length biographical treatments, as well as the object of ridicule by cartoonists and novelists of her day. Novels by Harriett Beecher Stowe, by Henry James, and by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner included characters believed to be depictions of Woodhull. Stowe presented her as the phony, publicity-seeking Dacia Dangyereyes in My Wife and I (1871), while James used a...