Writer, autobiographer, journalist, and public figure, Princess Ekaterina Romanovna Dashkova was one of the first women in Europe to hold governmental office. In 1783 she was appointed director of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences and founded and became president of the Russian Academy. Because of her education, travel abroad, and writings she became a leading figure in the introduction of eighteenth-century Russian culture to the West, while passing on aspects of the French Enlightenment to Russia.

An eminent woman of letters in eighteenth-century Russia, Dashkova was exceptional, mostly because the choices available to her were more representative of a man's life. She was born Ekaterina Romanovna Vorontsova in Saint Petersburg into wealth and privilege--the Empress Elizabeth was her godmother, and Peter III, whom she subsequently helped dethrone, was her godfather. Brought up in the home of her uncle the chancellor M. I. Vorontsov, she received an excellent education...