Lyndall Gordon's 2005 book is the most readable and engaging of all the Wollstonecraft's biographies, and many of her theories, deduced from credible and reasonable evidence, are intuitive and convincing. Like Claire Tomalin, Gordon has garnered laurels for her literary biographies, written over an expanse of 38 years. She has won the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for her biography of T. S. Eliot, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for her biography of Virginia Woolf, and the Cheltenham Prize for Literature for her biography of Charlotte Brontë. She was short-listed for the Duff Cooper Prize and Italy's Comisso Prize for her biography of Emily Dickinson. Vindication of the Life of Mary Wollstonecraft was a New York Times bestseller, longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, selected by the New York Times as one of its 100 notable books of the year, and listed by the New York Public Library as one its top 25 books of the year (2005). Her biography of Eliot was selected by The Independent (a British online newspaper) as one of the “30 best biographies of the twentieth century.”

Nevertheless, one must read Gordon's version of Wollstonecraft with skepticism, for she includes many theories and details that have no support and that seem sensational and arbitrarily contrary, perhaps simply for the purpose of having something new to contribute to the mix for the sake of publication. New and true are not always the same.

Chapter 1 of Gordon's story of Wollstonecraft begins in medias res: “In December 1792 an Englishwoman at thirty-three crossed the Channel to revolutionary France” (1). Gordon makes two points from the get-go that establish her perspective of Wollstonecraft's life. First, she emphasizes that here was an Englishwoman travelling on her own; she was a woman with great independence, driven by intellectual and political curiosity, hopeful that the French Revolution would usher in a utopic new world. Not only was it not fashionable for women to travel alone, it was not safe.