Of all the biographies, Her Own Woman: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft by Diane Jacobs, reads most nearly like a novel, while Lyndall Gordon's is the most enjoyable and accurate. Still, Jacobs fleshed out details that are both physical and psychological so that the reader is transported into scenes with an immediacy lacking in other biographies. Her sources were primarily letters instead of biographies or critical articles. In fact, if one scans her endnotes, one will find “Letter” and “ibid.” over and over, with only rare references to other sources. Her Own Woman is not scholarly in that it does not often contextualize its narrative or substantiate its claims with scholarly sources, but the result is a clean, clear and pleasant read. Jacobs sometimes supplies useful information to support generalizations, but at other times she makes sweeping deductions without foundations.

The focus of Jacobs's biography seems to be on relationships. She rarely discusses Wollstonecraft or her works without addressing Wollstonecraft in relationship with someone. And the relationship she addresses more “carefully” than most is the one with Fanny Blood. Although several scholars have implied that Wollstonecraft had homoerotic desires for Fanny, and that the passion she felt exceeded traditionally acceptable boundaries for same- sex relationships, Jacobs writes: “Suddenly, Mary had a goal: to forge what the eighteenth century called a ‘romantic friendship’” (27). An endnote to guide the reader to further reading or even to convince the reader that there was any such a thing that typified women-to-women relationships in the eighteenth century would have been helpful, but Jacobs obviously was not writing for academe. The book was published by Simon & Schuster for a broad audience. Nevertheless, her own explanation is useful. This is how she defines “romantic friendship”: “a relationship between two women that could be as tempestuous as any love affair, but only rarely involved sex,” and then she gives some examples of famous relationships of the day like Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, the “ladies of Llangollen” (27), but without explanation.