The Improbable Victoria Woodhull: Suffrage, Free Love, and the First Woman to Run for President

Essayist Collinsworth follows up What the Ermine Saw with a beguiling biography of Victoria Woodhull (1838–1927), a groundbreaking and enigmatic figure in women’s history. After opening with Woodhull’s 1893 libel case against a British Museum Library archivist, Mr. Garnett, for “cataloging... material she insisted contained unflattering references to her,” Collinsworth rewinds to Woodhull’s humble beginnings, when she worked with her sister for their con artist father as “amazing child clairvoyants”—a trade they continued as adults, serving as spiritual consultants to Cornelius Vanderbilt. With Vanderbilt’s backing, the sisters opened a Wall Street brokerage firm (at a time when women weren’t allowed to trade stocks) and founded their own newspaper; Woodhull eventually ran for president (at a time when women couldn’t vote). Much of the book follows Woodhull’s ambitious trajectory through the eyes of Mr. Garnett, whom Collinsworth places in the role of researcher, studying the woman who sued him—a distracting and unnecessary conceit. Still, Collinsworth’s Woodhull is captivating enough that this misstep is worth overlooking—the author excels at conveying the chameleon-like nature of a woman who was “in the business of reinventing her past,” including through numerous self-published pamphlets (one so effusive that a critic remarked, “Such a book is a tomb from which no author again rises”). It’s a transfixing character study. (Sept.)