Best known as one of the several worshipers who literally sat at the feet of George Eliot during the last decade of the novelist's life, Edith Simcox deserves recognition for her own substantial contributions to reform in Victorian England. Diffident by nature and denied the Oxford education that purchased distinguished careers for her two brothers, she nonetheless achieved distinction in her lifetime as a writer and woman of action. She wrote influential essays and reviews on a range of topics for many leading Victorian periodicals; she published three books, including two volumes of a projected multivolume history of ownership; she demonstrated the feasibility of labor cooperatives by jointly operating a shirtmaking enterprise; she lectured widely on trade unionism, socialism, and Women's suffrage; and she won wide praise for her work on the London School Board and on behalf of the international labor movement. As her essays and books...