A writer of eclectic interests and limitless enthusiasms, Harriet Martineau was a novelist, political economist, journalist, travel writer, essayist, historian, translator, editor, and autobiographer. Her prodigious output resulted in works of uneven quality; but she never restricted her pursuits, which ranged from books for children to studies of the future government of India. Throughout her long, illness-plagued life--she was born without a sense of smell or taste, gradually lost her hearing, and was an invalid for five years until cured by mesmerism--Harriet Martineau was an energetic popularizer of the leading ideas of economics, history, and social thought.

During her career as a writer, Martineau received the attention and praise of Henry Hallam, Sydney Smith, Thomas Malthus, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and W. C. Macready. Carlyle, among the many to celebrate this early Victorian bluestocking, noted in a letter to Emerson in 1837 that Martineau was "a genuine little Poetess, buckrammed, swathed...