Eloquent and forceful in defence of liberty, Wright insisted that liberty be based on knowledge, that knowledge be based on experience and that there could be no true liberty if women were excluded from education and active participation in civil society. Equally, liberty in the United States required an end to slavery, which had famously been proven illegal under Scots law in 1777 in the case of Joseph Knight. Wright’s essays are both arguments in favour of scientific truth – ‘the true Bible is the book of nature, the wisest teacher he who most plainly expounds it’ – and demonstrations that such knowledge could be acquired by and appropriately promoted by a woman. She was, in her speeches, writings and social activism, the living embodiment of the relevance of her philosophy to the transformation of human relations and the advancement of a more equal society.

Cairns Craig, Glucksman Professor of Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen

This re-issue of Frances Wright’s popular lectures offers a valuable introduction to the wide-ranging radicalism of her ideas. A public lecturer at a time when women were not expected to speak in public, Wright addressed the emancipation of slaves, the empowering of women and the defence of all kinds of free inquiry, and she called for a politics of progressive improvement for all. A reading of Frances Wright offers important insights into the feminism and radicalism of the 1820s in the early American Republic.

Jane Rendall, University of York