Other powers

This is history at its most vivid, set amid the battle for woman suffrage, the Spiritualist movement that swept across the nation (10 million strong by midcentury) in the age of Radical Reconstruction following the Civil War, and the bitter fight that pitted black men against white women in the struggle to win the right to vote.

The cast includes Victoria Woodhull, spiritual and financial advisor to Commodore Vanderbilt; Tennessee Claflin, sister of Victoria; Henry Ward Beecher, the great preacher of Brooklyn's Plymouth Church; Lib Tilton, angelic, obedient wife of Theodore Tilton; Elizabeth Cady Stanton; Anna Dickinson, model for Verena Tarrant in Henry James's The Bostonians; Horace Greeley, editor of the Tribune; and Anthony Comstock, U.S. special postal agent.

All of these people play major roles in this compelling book. Barbara Goldsmith draws on ten years of research and letters, diaries, newspaper clippings, and court transcripts to tell the story of a woman who embodied - and lived - the tumults that were shaping the America of her time.