As its title indicates, Andrew Cayton's book extends beyond what would be considered a biography. It offers a picture of Wollstonecraft that is very different from any other biography because it focuses more on the people in her life and the events that surrounded it.

Readers might assume that they are in for something different not only from the title but from the opening sentence: “Gilbert Imlay was a citizen of the United States, and Mary Wollstonecraft a subject of George III of Great Britain” (1). It definitely sets the stage for Cayton's agenda. Cayton is a historian and not a literary critic although his knowledge of eighteenth- century literature is prodigious. If he had intended to introduce his study like a biographer, he might have begun with the paragraph that ends his book:

The analogy would have been an effective and appropriate opening for a biography. The camera obscura was first invented by a Chinese philosopher in the fifth century BCE, and Aristotle described it in the next. But the prototype for the twentieth- century camera was being developed in seventeenthcentury Britain and became portable models in the eighteenth century but were not widely used (Ward 75–78) until Tom Wedgwood figured out how to copy paintings onto glass and then to moisten white paper with nitrate silver in order to capture an image (R. Litchfield 189–205).