Caroline Franklin's biography is one of the sparest of the full- length biographies on Wollstonecraft. Franklin must have made the conscious determination to avoid duplication of what had been already published and to focus only on reconstructing Wollstonecraft's intellectual and political network that produced the emancipatory print culture of the late eighteenth century. Franklin perceives Wollstonecraft primarily as an autodidact, a term she attaches to Wollstonecraft and frequently repeats. Her objective is to identify those forces and people who educated Wollstonecraft, who, in turn, educated others through her writing.

On the first page of the first chapter, Franklin lets it be known that she is interested in Wollstonecraft's and Godwin's fascination with childhood and how its experiences form character. Although other writers were engaged in education reform and changes in the way that children were being raised in the eighteenth century, Wollstonecraft and Godwin—two social reformers who wrote mostly for adults—realized that reform had to begin with childrearing. It was a revolutionary idea. The prevalent attitude in the seventeenth century was that children were born of sin, that sin was passed down from the parents to child, and that it was the parents’ or nurses’ or society's jobs to beat the sin out of them (Plumb 65). Prior to the Industrial Revolution, Britain persisted in somewhat a feudal state, where every member of society knew his or her place and relationship to those above and below. Working- class families, whether they made things or grew things, all worked together, including the children, generation after generation staying in the same geographical communities. With the Enclosure Acts of the late eighteenth century and the end of cottage industry, the physical and social mobility of England's lower classes—the largest part of the population—had a pronounced effect on their perception of children, especially with the rise of public schools and Sunday Schools and their making education available to the masses. Stopping in the middle of that cataclysmic upheaval, and pondering the effect of environment instead of sin on the formation of human character, is what Franklin attributes to both Wollstonecraft and Godwin.