Charlotte Gordon had a brilliant idea when she produced a dual biography through which to identify the effect that Wollstonecraft had on her youngest daughter. Gordon noticed that even among those readers acquainted with Wollstonecraft and Mary Godwin Shelley (the author of Frankenstein), very few connected the two: “They viewed mother and daughter as unrelated figures representing different philosophical stances and literary movements. Shelley appears in the epilogues of biographies of Wollstonecraft, and Wollstonecraft in the introductory pages of lives of Shelley” (xv–xvi). Therefore, Gordon set out to examine the famous mother's imprint on her also famous daughter through Wollstonecraft's letters, journals, published works and biographies. She also studied Godwin's account/ idealization and the views held by Shelley's contemporaries of Wollstonecraft. Actually, Gordon says that she took the opposite approach by attending to “the echo of Wollstonecraft in Shelley's letters, journals, and novels” (xvii), but her book pulls both ways. Her organizational plan is one chapter on Shelley, the next on Wollstonecraft followed by another on Shelley, and so on, each primarily but not always in chronological order, but with highlighted parallels between the two. She summarizes the affinity in her introduction:

With Gordon's thesis being to determine the intersections of the two women, she is quite successful, and her approach to meshing their biographical material is novel.

That said, however, much of what she presents about Wollstonecraft is haggard and redundant with what has been published already, unsupported by documentation, replete with errors made by previous biographers and diminished by a new set of errors. Notwithstanding these problems, she does offer a few compelling insights. One is her appreciation of Wollstonecraft's Letters from Sweden. Gordon identifies it as a “psychological journey, one of the first explicit examinations of an author's inner life” (342).